Thursday Oct 15, 2020

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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The Medusa Sculpture That Became #MeToo Art P20

Executive Order Could Stay the Same, or Not P4

Doubts Reign on Reopening of Schools, Face-to-Face Classes P5

Health Professionals: Risk Index, Data Show PR Is at ‘Code Yellow’ Physicians & Surgeons Assn. Urges Holding Back on Further Reopening Despite Calls to the Contrary from Economic Sector

Photo by New York Times

Health Chief Tests Positive for COVID-19; Fortaleza Takes Safety Measures

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It’s on: Now NPP pols ask PDP counterparts to make staff members’ payroll info public

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group of New Progressive Party (NPP) members of the island House of Representatives and one candidate for a House seat demanded on Wednesday that Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Reps.

Luis Raúl Torres, Ángel Matos García, José “Conny” Varela, Lydia Méndez and Rafael “Tatito” Hernández -- all of whom are seeking re-election -- make public a detailed and complete listing of their employees, including salaries, timesheets and assigned tasks from January 2013 to the present.

House candidate Yamilete González (District 21), along with NPP Reps. Sergio Estévez (District 40), José “Papo” Mercado (District 32), Isabelo “Chabelo” Molina (District 11) and Ricardo “Chino” Rey (District 2) -- who are also running for re-election -- gave the PDP lawmakers five days to provide the requested information, including budget disbursements and invoices from contractors.

“Today we are making an official request to Representatives Matos, Méndez, Hernández, Varela and Torres to provide us with each and every one of the invoices issued by all their contractors from January 2013 to September 2020,” the NPP candidates said in a written statement. “Likewise, we ask that the complete list of employees be delivered to us with a detailed description of their positions and assigned tasks, as well as the attendance sheets of each of these employees during the aforementioned period of time. Also, we ask for a complete breakdown of how they allocated their office budgets, including the purchases they made.”

The request for information is made under the protection of Act 141-2019, better known as the Transparency and Expedited Process for Access to Public Information Law. “Residents of Districts 2, 11, 21, 32 and 40, which comprise the municipalities of San Juan, Dorado,Vega Alta, Vega Baja, Caguas, Carolina, Lajas, Guánica, Sabana Grande, Maricao and Yauco, have the right to know how the towns’ money has been spent,” the NPP candidates added. “We believe that there should be no problem in presenting the data within

the requested term. If they do not do so, we will be going to court to ask for help and to rule in favor of transparency and the publication of these data in the public domain.”

One of the PDP legislators, Matos García, agreed to share the data.

“I authorize the House of Representatives @CamaraConPR to deliver all information related to the fiscal management of our office,” Matos García said in a written communication. “To those who now ask for transparency, I invite you to join the legal lawsuit filed by citizens and @ppdpr so that all spending information in the legislature is delivered #sinmiedo.”

PDP Representative Ángel Matos García agreed to share all information related to the fiscal management of his office.

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Health professionals urge keeping executive order intact; others demand full reopen

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @PCorreaHenry Special to The Star

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here was a meeting with the medical group yesterday [Tuesday], and then with the economic group today [Wednesday], and the differences between both positions are significant. Therefore, the governor [Wanda Vázquez Garced] must decide.”

That is what Physicians and Surgeons Association of Puerto Rico PresidentVíctor Ramos said Wednesday when the Star asked what was expected for the next executive order, scheduled to take effect Oct. 17, as the Puerto Rico government continues to respond to the COVID-19 public health emergency.

Ramos told the Star that even though the economic sector is demanding “a significant reopening” as they advocate for expanded hours of operation and higher limits on customer capacity at commercial establishments, meanwhile the medical sector is recommending that Vázquez keep the next order as is to maintain control of the coronavirus pandemic.

“COVID-19 doesn’t come separately. It’s not the only illness we are attending to at hospitals; it’s not the only ailment that fills up our hospitals. We must consider the things that are about to happen: Halloween and general elections,” Ramos said. “What I see is that [COVID-19] cases are still going up, 200 to 300 cases a day. We are stuck -- cases are not rising dramatically, so saying otherwise might be lying, but cases are not going down.”

Ramos raised further concerns for a wider reopening given that intensive care unit beds and general hospital beds are “oc-

cupied by 62 percent and more than 50 percent, respectively,” and there’s a lack of medical personnel in the field to assist more COVID-19 patients and others “who had chronic health issues and feared going to hospitals due to the coronavirus and now show up due to medical complications.”

“Today, there are some hospitals that have ceased to do elective surgeries that require an ICU out of fear they would fill beds that might be needed later; that is what’s happening in the field,” Ramos said, noting that numbers “shouldn’t only be calculated and painted with a color.”

COVID-19 risk index is at ‘Code Yellow’ Puerto Rico Public Health Trust Executive Director José Rodríguez Orengo told the Star that after not receiving test results from the laboratory Quest Diagnostics for two weeks

due to the island Health Department (DS by its Spanish initials) detaining them after an unusual amount of positive cases of the coronavirus, “it provided a better view of what’s going on on the island with COVID-19.”

“From September 28 to October 8, we have all the data from the Department of Health attached, and what it indicates to us, according to our risk index, is that we are at moderate risk,” Rodríguez Orengo said. “That’s the same [level] we were at back on Sept. 6, when we gave the recommendation to reopen [the economy] again, when gyms and movie theaters were able to operate. Our advice is to keep the next executive order at this level.”

When the Star asked if there should be any concerns after the DS on Tuesday reported 40 new hospitalizations due to COVID-19, Rodríguez Orengo said that with the information that was provided through Oct. 11 and analyzed by the trust, “there were around 38 percent of ICUs available” and noted that “in the 23 weeks that the island has been under the public health emergency, availability rate has never been under 30 percent.”

“If you tell me today that -- I haven’t seen the numbers today as I go over them during the evening to revise the information -- if I see a pattern, that pattern must be noted because there could be some kind of outbreak or any other explanation that can be reported,” he said. “At the moment, what we have observed is that the situation has been community outbreaks, and that community outbreaks are moderate. By moderate, I mean that there is an average of 190 to 210 people becoming infected [with COVID-19] daily. If we see an increase in this portion, that would lead to concerns.”

La Fortaleza is under quarantine: Health secretary tests positive for COVID-19

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @PCorreaHenry Special to The Star

I

t was expected to be a busy day at La Fortaleza as Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced was about to hold meetings on Wednesday with members of her constitutional cabinet and Police Members Association President José Taboada de Jesús to discuss the new executive order slated to take effect Saturday in the Puerto Rico government’s ongoing effort to protect the public health amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, all meetings had to be postponed after island Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano tested positive for the coronavirus.

As the Star arrived at the executive mansion ahead of the meetings and other activities, all had been canceled.

There was not much activity around the premises and the environment felt tense and gloomy with a hectic day ahead for both the government and members of the press.

González Feliciano said in a written statement that “after having been traveling for the past few days, I took the COVID-19 test, which came back positive.”

“Responsibly, I will be in isolation for the recommended time, according to the [recommendations of the Health Department’s] Office of Epidemiology. In addition, I offered information about the people with whom I spent

time in the past few days so that the corresponding contact tracing begins,” González Feliciano said. “Although I will keep working remotely from my home as long as my health allows it, I will be out of any public activity. I thank everyone for the space to handle this health matter with the commitment to rejoin as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, La Fortaleza Spokesperson Mariana Cobián said in a written statement that upon becoming aware of the Health secretary’s positive COVID-19 test result, the governor canceled the meetings scheduled for Wednesday “as a precaution” and that the Palacio de Santa Catalina administration would be begin cleaning the establishment according to state protocol.

Noting that La Fortaleza Chief of Staff Antonio Pabón Batlle and Public Affairs Secretary Osvaldo Soto García would be in charge of the cabinet meeting, Cobián said the governor had tested negative for the coronavirus as of Tuesday after meeting with the Health secretary, describing Vázquez as “asymptomatic.”

“The First Executive arrived from a trip to New York last Thursday, when the molecular test for COVID-19 was carried out, with a negative result. Yesterday [Tuesday] at 4:20 p.m., she proceeded to carry out the follow-up test, which also came back negative,” Cobián said. “However, as she met with González Feliciano yesterday [Tuesday] before taking the test, all meetings and activities that

were scheduled for this week will be postponed or will be conducted virtually, as recommended by the [deputy Health] secretary, Dr. Iris Cardona. Likewise, the test will be conducted again in five days.”

The Star requested a remote interview with the Health secretary regarding what was to be expected from the next executive order, with the current one expiring Friday.

Michelle de la Cruz, a spokesperson for the Health Department, told the newspaper that González Feliciano would “not be taking interviews today.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

5

Education secretary leaves reopening of schools up to Health Dept.

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

I

sland Education Secretary Eligio Hernández Pérez on Wednesday left the reopening of schools with in-person classes in the hands of the Health Department.

“The issue of reopening will be tied to the context of handling the pandemic and positive cases,” Hernández Pérez told the press. “So, we have weekly meetings with the team of epidemiologists from the Department of Health who make internal administrative recommendations to us and it will be the Department of Health that will make the determinations on pandemic management and the Department of Education [that will make] the administrative determinations regarding it.”

Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano said earlier that the department is working to see how face-to-face classes might begin in schools before the end of this year.

“We are more prepared than before, but it [the return to face-to-face classes] is always under discussion. We will not be able to always be at home,” González Feliciano said in a radio interview. “We have to be well prepared. Both public schools and private schools, and universities, we have to be prepared to start [face-to-face classes], in some way, at some point.”

“There have been advances in being able to hold face-to-face classes,” the Health chief added. “There are requests

from parents, teachers, particularly from universities and particularly private schools. Obviously they [private schools] have greater resources and have also invested in infrastructure to ensure that infections can be better controlled.”

González Feliciano added that his department is “working directly with the secretary of Education for the surveillance part” to prevent coronavirus infections.

“We already have within the system names of students, and parents and teachers in order to monitor” COVID-19 cases, he said.

“There are models; we have seen states that have started face-to-face classes,” said González Feliciano, referring to places

where in-person classes are held on some days of the week.

The Health secretary said the department will be presenting recommendations to Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced regarding the return to face-to-face classes in schools.

“We are taking all the determinations recommended by the Department of Health,” González Feliciano said. “However, the health of children and school communities always goes above any other consideration.”

Asked about the possibility of teachers refusing to start face-to-face classes, Hernández Pérez dismissed the premise.

“No. The teachers of the public educational system have always and historically

shown an impressive level of commitment to Puerto Rico and this [situation] is no exception,” he said.

The Education chief was also asked about what specific steps the department has taken to receive students for face-toface classes.

“The process of opening the schools is contained within the contingency plan,” he said. “The contingency plan establishes the stages and phases. It includes the materials and actions of the agency, and the materials have been acquired in accordance with that contingency plan. So, my first invitation, before I say we have bought, well, look, we have bought thermometers, there is the monitoring staff. There are going to be isolation rooms, among other things, that you can fully know.”

Hernández Pérez noted that the phases of reopening the island educational system consist of the distance education phase, followed by hybrid education and later face-to-face instruction.

He said 72 percent of students have devices needed for distance education.

Those who do not have internet or electronic devices go to schools where they receive printed modules or modules that are loaded into devices such as tablets, the Education secretary said.

Hernández Pérez said he went to La Fortaleza for a meeting, but it was postponed after it was made known that González Feliciano had tested positive for COVID-19 and the governor canceled all her meetings pending a coronavirus test.

Health chief: San Sebastián Street Festival in January uncertain

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he celebration of the 52nd edition of the San Sebastián Street Festival (known in Spanish as Fiesta de la Calle San Sebastián, or SanSe for short) in January of next year seems uncertain, island Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano said Wednesday.

“The [constrictions on] mobility that exist in Old San Juan and the great number of people who enter this type of activity” is an environment of great risk for becoming infected with the coronavirus, González Feliciano said in a radio interview with journalist Rubén Sánchez.

Tens of thousands of people go to the event by ferry from Cataño, where in recent years a small festival has also been held. The main site of the festivities is Old San Juan.

The Urban Train and Metropolitan Bus Authority and private buses also transport tens of thousands of people

to the celebration every day.

The four-day event attracts people from all over Puerto Rico as well as visitors from abroad, the Health secretary noted, so in times of pandemic it is not possible to protect thousands of revelers from coronavirus infection.

The San Sebastián Street Festival typically starts on the second Thursday in January and runs through Sunday.

As the Star reported Oct. 5, Old San Juan Merchants Association Vice President Juan Fernández said in an interview that there has been no conversation about the 2021 edition of the festival not only due to the COVID-19 pandemic but also because it would be taking place after an election year.

“When there have been government changes, you know that the elected government takes their seats at the beginning of January and they have two weeks left to organize the event; it’s impossible for them to organize it [sooner],” Fernández said.

The Farmacia Luma owner said that what would be “ideal” would be for a municipal non-governmental organization to be in charge of organizing the festival, but “since the municipality took over the festival, now, when we see who [takes over] the municipal government -- we don’t know who will win -- we have to see what approach the next mayor will take.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Consumer rep: PREPA-LUMA deal puts $10.5 billion granted by FEMA at risk

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he consumer representative on the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) board, Tomás Torres Placa, said Wednesday that the contract between the power utility and LUMA Energy would put at risk more than $10 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for the reconstruction of the grid.

“Every time the Public-Private Partnerships [Authority], the Energy Bureau, LUMA itself and the Electric Power Authority refuse to allow this to go to a public process, they put at risk the $10.5 billion in FEMA funds that were recently assigned to Puerto Rico,” Torres Placa said in an interview with Radio Isla 1320 AM. He was referring to the fact that the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau gave the green light to the contract to manage PREPA’s transmission and distribution system without taking the matter to public hearings. Negotiations between LUMA Energy and the Public-Private Partnerships Authority were also conducted behind closed doors.

“Every day that passes, that this contract is not evaluated by the regulator, as it would have been evaluated in any other jurisdiction in the United States,” Torres Placa said. “Everything is put at risk because we [are] talking about unorthodox practices that are not used anywhere in the world.”

The contract has raised concerns that LUMA Energy

may be able to give contracts to its consortium companies, Quanto and ATCO, because it has no restrictions. After it was announced that FEMA was going to give $12.8 billion to Puerto Rico, LUMA Energy said that it brings world-class utility expertise and, through its collaboration with disaster management firm IEM, the experience of successfully administering more than $80 billion in federal disaster funds.

“As part of our operating and maintenance contract, we are putting in place the team, policies and procedures to manage the federal funds announced today with efficiency, transparency and integrity,” LUMA Energy said in a statement.

“This is our commitment to Puerto Rico.”

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has said the contract is likely to push the price of electricity from a targeted 20 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to 30 cents/kWh because of the added costs of debt servicing, fuel prices, political patronage and poor contracting. Consultant and oversight fees are expected to rise to $254 million during the current fiscal year, enough to boost electricity rates by 1.6 cents/kWh. The LUMA contract also encourages the use of natural gas, thwarting the island’s goal of achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 by allowing LUMA to file changes with regulators to the island’s integrated resource plan.

PDP lawmaker calls Pierluisi a defender of LUMA Energy

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

R

ep. Luis Raúl Torres charged Wednesday that New Progressive Party (NPP) gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi’s refusal to cancel the LUMA Energy contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) if he is elected shows that Pierluisi continues to be tied to large economic interests while turning his back on the people of Puerto Rico.

NPP gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi

“Pedro Pierluisi, instead of canceling the LUMA Energy contract, prefers to defend it by becoming LUMA’s lawyer,” the San Juan District 2 lawmaker said. “The question is: Why does Pierluisi prefer to keep a contract in force that will cost the people close to $2 billion? Why does he continue to act like a lawyer for the big interests?”

The Popular Democratic Party legislator insisted that the record of the NPP candidate for governor as a defender of big interests has been clear and always goes against the best interests of Puerto Rico residents.

“We have a candidate who has tripled his income working for the fiscal oversight board, making decisions and recommending actions against our people,” Torres said. “Now, he prefers to be the lawyer for LUMA Energy and the big interests even if it costs our people millions. Pedro Pierluisi is not interested in the rising cost of [electrical] service, the removal of PREPA employees, the loss of benefits for retirees, and a multiplier impact on our economy. LUMA will increase the cost of electricity, and in turn, increase the cost of doing business on the island.”

“The only candidate for governor with a genuine commitment and in favor of the people is Charlie Delgado,” he added. “Acting in a responsible manner, as only a good administrator knows how, he ordered a legal analysis of this

contract and has been categorical that it must be canceled to ensure transparency and avoid the waste or misuse of funds at the Electric Power Authority. Only Charlie Delgado has the plan and the vision to transform PREPA and ensure that we have a sustainable system.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

7

Census count can be cut short, Supreme court rules

By ADAM LIPTAK and MICHAEL WINES

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he Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to halt the 2020 census count ahead of schedule, effectively shutting down what has been the most contentious and litigated census in memory and setting the stage for a bitter fight over how to use its numbers for the apportionment of the next Congress.

The brief unsigned order formally only pauses the population count while the administration and a host of groups advocating a more accurate census battle in a federal appeals court over whether the count could be stopped early.

As a practical matter, however, it almost certainly ensures an early end because the census — one of the largest government activities, involving hundreds of thousands of workers — cannot be easily restarted and little time remains before its current deadline at the end of this month. In fact, some census workers say, the bureau had already begun shutting down some parts of its count despite a court order to continue it.

The census has been buffeted both by the coronavirus pandemic and the involvement of the Trump administration in what has traditionally been a rigorously nonpartisan, data-driven exercise. Its early end could mean that White House officials, rather than Census Bureau experts, may use the population numbers to determine representation in the House of Representatives and in state and local governments.

President Donald Trump has insisted those numbers should not include undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

That conflicts with the mandate of the Constitution that the census count all residents of the country and would almost certainly give more representation to Republicans.

The court’s order gave no reasons, which is typical when the court acts on emergency applications. It said the count could stop while appeals moved forward.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying that “the harms associated with an inaccurate census are avoidable and intolerable.”

The order was a major victory for the Trump administration, which had been rebuffed by both district and appeals courts in its effort to end the count early. It was a bitter defeat for state and local governments and advocacy groups that had sued to keep the population count going despite the administration’s determination to shut it down.

“The court’s action will cause irreversible damage to efforts to achieve a fair and accurate census,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents many of the parties that sued. “It’s incredibly disappointing.”

Terri Ann Lowenthal, a longtime census expert and consultant to several groups pressing for an accurate tally, charged that the disarray caused by the administration’s handling of the count “inevitably will undermine whatever public confidence remains in the census results.”

The administration “could do the right thing and allow those operations to wind down in an organized way over the next two weeks, or it could continue to push for rushed results, accuracy and quality be damned,” she said. “The commerce secretary’s next steps will tell us everything we need to know.”

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who is one of the country’s top experts on administrative law, said the

Census workers planning routes in New York in March. A Supreme Court order on Tuesday was a victory for the Trump administration, which argued that it needed to shut down census field work to meet a statutory deadline. ruling was in some ways unsurprising. “Whatever one makes of the policy impacts underlying the Trump administration’s position on the timetable for finishing the census,” he said, “today’s ruling does generally fit with the court’s long-standing deferential posture” toward actions by federal agencies.

The justices’ decision is but the latest turnabout in a saga that has seen the deadline for completing the population count — originally set for August, after a decade of preparation — shifted to Oct. 31, then abruptly changed to Sept. 30, then restored by courts to Oct. 31.

The legal battle has focused on whether the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, had followed federal law when it set the Sept. 30 deadline. But the subtext has always been whether a curtailed count would be accurate enough to set the baseline for allotting political power and trillions of dollars over the next decade — and whether Trump was seeking to take control of the count for political advantage.

Most experts said a shortened census would only worsen existing undercounts of the people who have always been hardest for census workers to reach — minorities who are suspicious of the government, and the poor and young people, who move frequently and are more difficult to track down.

Because those groups live predominantly in urban areas, an undercount also would be likely to dilute the political power of Democrats who disproportionately represent those areas. For the same reason, Trump’s plan to exclude unauthorized immigrants from population totals used to allot political power would probably further dilute Democratic representation in many — although hardly all — areas with large immigrant populations.

The deadline for completing the count was originally moved from August to Oct. 31 after the pandemic all but shuttered many

census operations last spring. Because of that delay, the Census Bureau said it would move the dates for delivering population figures used by the House and states for reapportionment and redistricting to next April and beyond.

But in August, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordered the Oct. 31 deadline moved up a month to Sept. 30, saying the extra time was needed to deliver preliminary population totals to Trump by the statutory deadline of Dec. 31.

Ross’ action came over the objection of career census experts who argued that it would undermine, perhaps fatally, the accuracy of the count. It forced the bureau to abandon on short notice some of the counting safeguards it was using to make the tally reliable. And it quickly triggered a lawsuit seeking to keep the tally going.

The move came not long after the announcement in July that the administration would seek to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population totals it would send to Congress for reapportioning seats in the House.

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NBC says Trump will hold town hall meeting Thursday, competing against Biden

President Trump and his aides have chosen not to share extensive details about his medical condition.

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

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resident DonaldTrump may not be debating Joe Biden on the same stage on Thursday night as originally planned.

But the two candidates will still face off head-to-head.

NBC News confirmed on Wednesday that it would broadcast a prime-time town-hall-style event with Trump from Miami on Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern, with the president fielding questions from Florida voters.

The event is scheduled to directly overlap with ABC’s

televised town hall meeting that night with Biden in Philadelphia, which is also set to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern.

The NBC event, to be moderated by the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, had been contingent on the Trump campaign providing independent proof that the president, who announced early this month that he had contracted the coronavirus, would not pose a safety risk to the other participants — including NBC crew members, voters and Guthrie herself.

As late as Tuesday afternoon, NBC executives were waiting for that proof, but the network determined late Tuesday that it would be comfortable moving forward, according to two people familiar with the planning.

On the “Today” show on Wednesday, the NBC anchor Craig Melvin said the town hall would occur “in accordance with the guidelines set forth by health officials” and proffered a statement from Clifford Lane, a clinical director at the National Institutes of Health, who said he reviewed data about Trump’s condition and concluded “with a high degree of confidence” that the president is “not shedding infectious virus.”

The network did not explicitly say that Trump had received a negative result from a PCR test, a widely used diagnostic test for the coronavirus that is considered more reliable than a rapid antigen test.

Trump and his aides have not shared extensive details about the president’s medical condition with the public, and over the past few days, NBC executives were no exception.

Until late Tuesday, the network had been prepared to cancel the event if the president’s team did not present convincing

evidence that Trump would not potentially infect those around him, one of the people said.

NBC officials began discussing the possibility of a town hall with the Trump campaign last week, after Trump pulled out of the second planned presidential debate. The network made clear at the start of discussions that it needed outside proof of the president’s medical condition.

NBC officials did not say exactly what testing criteria the network had requested, but its management said it was not relying solely on the word of the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, the two people said.

Conley has not taken reporters’ questions in more than a week. On Monday, he said that Trump had tested negative “on consecutive days” using a rapid antigen coronavirus test not intended for that purpose. Experts have cautioned that the test’s accuracy has not yet been investigated enough to be sure that the president is virus-free.

The NBC event, which will be held outdoors, is one of Trump’s last opportunities of the campaign to make his case before a large televised audience. It will be simulcast on MSNBC and CNBC, virtually guaranteeing the president a higher Nielsen rating than Biden’s town hall that night, which is set to air on a single traditional TV network.

The dueling ABC and NBC telecasts came about after Trump rejected a proposal for a virtual debate that was supposed to be held in Miami on Thursday night, torpedoing plans for his second formal meeting with Biden, his Democratic rival. The two candidates are scheduled to meet for a final debate in Nashville, Tennessee, next Thursday, Oct. 22, moderated by the NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker.

White House embraces declaration from scientists that relies on ‘herd immunity’

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

T

he White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable — an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine.

Many experts say “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still very far-off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85% to 90% of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.

On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names, cited an Oct. 4 petition titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those

who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

The declaration has more than 9,000 signatories from all over the world, its website says, though most of the names are not public. The document grew out of a meeting hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian-leaning research organization.

Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, the academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Donald Trump’s science adviser. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity.

The declaration’s architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10% to 20% of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with.

Last month, at the request of The New York Times, three epidemiological teams calculated the percentage of the country that is infected. What they found runs strongly counter to the theory being promoted in influential circles that the United States has

either already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses, schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other distancing measures could be abandoned.

“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10% or 20% is just nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.

The move comes amid a coronavirus outbreak at the White House that has now grown to more than 20 people, as evidence mounts that the administration did little to prevent or contain the virus’s spread.

On Tuesday night, officials with the Department of Labor said that the wife of the secretary, Eugene Scalia, tested positive for the coronavirus earlier in the day. Trish Scalia, who was said to be experiencing “mild symptoms,” and her husband were at a Rose Garden event honoring Judge Amy Coney Barrett that is being eyed as the source of several infections in people connected to the White House. The secretary tested negative, officials said, but he will work from home “for the time being.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

9

Indian Americans overwhelmingly support Joe Biden, new poll shows

By EMILY SCHMALL

A

large majority of Indian Americans plan to cast ballots for the Democratic ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, according to a survey released Wednesday, despite elaborate overtures by the Trump White House to win their support.

The survey, by the polling firm YouGov, found that 72% of Indian American voters planned to vote for Biden, with just 22% planning to go for President Donald Trump.

While Indian Americans hold a wide variety of political views, the presence on the Democratic ticket of Harris, whose mother immigrated from Chennai, India, has had a galvanizing effect on a voting bloc that could help Biden in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan.

Their potential impact on the presidential election highlights the growing importance of Indian Americans in U.S. politics: As the second-largest immigrant group in the country, Indian Americans are gaining influence, making political donations, vocally supporting candidates and causes and, most notably, running for office, from the school board to Congress.

“We have arrived,” said Ramesh Kapur, a Democratic Party fundraiser.

Kapur, 72, who owns a gas processing and distributing company in Medford, Massachusetts, and supported Harris’ 2016 Senate race and her run for the 2020 presidential nomination, said that Indian Americans donated $3.3 million to the Biden Victory Fund at a single fundraising event he organized in September.

But Harris isn’t the only reason many Indian Americans support the Democratic ticket this year, Kapur said. They are also turned off by the president’s frequent attacks on immigrants and people of color, despite standing to gain from Trump’s economic policies.

“Even though they are supposedly saving taxes, to the Indian American community, when you get the president of the United States saying to an elected official, ‘Go home,’ that scares the hell out of us,” he said, referring to Trump’s tweet in July 2019 about a group of four minority congresswomen.

While the approximately 2 million Indian American voters comprise less than 1% of the electorate, they are voters who both parties seek to attract. The larger Indian American population is twice as rich as the rest of the country as a whole, and two times

as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

And at the rate the community is growing — doubling in size every decade since the 1980s — they represent an increasingly formidable force in U.S. politics.

The apparently wide support among Indian Americans for Biden comes despite high-profile efforts by Trump and the Republicans to win their votes.

A year ago, Trump drew 50,000 people to a rally in Houston with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, an event that organizers called “Howdy, Modi.” The prime minister, a right-wing populist whose bellicose views on two of India’s rivals, Pakistan and China, helped win his party a landslide reelection in 2019, and who has generally received support from the Indian diaspora, lauded Trump’s name as “familiar to every person on the planet.”

He returned the favor in February with an even larger spectacle for Trump in India.

The rallies did win Trump some support, said M.R. Rangaswami, the founder of Indiaspora, a nonpartisan group that promotes the interests of Indians in the United States.

“Trump has invested in India, has invested in Indian Americans with the ‘Howdy, Modi’ visit and with going to India, and it has shown results,” Rangaswami said. “The question is: Will it outweigh the Kamala factor?”

Indeed, the survey reported that 45% of respondents said that Harris’ nomination had made them more likely to vote, and 49% said they were more enthusiastic about supporting Biden. It also showed that respondents cared more about health care, the economy and the environment than U.S.-India relations.

YouGov conducted the survey as part of a research project by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump has also lost some favor in India, where the news media criticized him for casting doubt on the integrity of Indian government coronavirus statistics during the presidential debate last month.

Rangaswami, who attended the Houston rally and is registered as an independent, said the audience appeared to consist largely of older Indian Americans, who he said leaned conservative and most likely voted for Trump in 2016.

That Indian American voters lean liberal overall is partly because a younger generation, born in the United States, is far less convinced by the conservative cultural mores brought by their

parents and grandparents from India, Rangaswami said.

“There’s definitely that schism in the Indian American community,” said Raj Bhutoria, 20, a junior at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, who has dreamed of running for office since working as a volunteer on the successful 2016 campaign of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an Indian American.

Khanna’s victory and Harris’ nomination show that “now being Indian is no longer a barrier to run for office or get elected,” Bhutoria said.

Despite wishing that the Democratic nominees were more progressive on some issues, Bhutoria said he was supporting them — though with perhaps less gusto than his parents, Ajay and Vinita Bhutoria, Bay Area tech entrepreneurs in their 40s who, as avowed liberals, are somewhat of an exception for their generation. They have starred in three ads supporting the BidenHarris campaign, set to Bollywood music and featuring slogans in a variety of Indian languages.

Bhutoria cited Trump’s trade disputes with India, pressure on countries not to trade with Iran — an important source of cheap oil for India — and the suspension of H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, a large number of which go to Indians.

“The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event was wonderful to look at, but they were only beautiful picture moments,” he said. “Trump has not done much for India or Indians Americans.”

Senator Kamala Harris has had a galvanizing effect on Indian-Americans, a voting bloc that could help the Democratic ticket in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

A $52,112 helicopter ride: Coronavirus patients battle surprise medical bills

By SARAH KLIFF

A

n intubated coronavirus patient was declining rapidly when doctors decided to airlift her to a hospital with better critical care resources.

“It’s life or death,” the family of the 60-year-old woman recalled being told when it happened in April. “We have to transfer her now.”

The patient was flown by helicopter from one Philadelphia hospital to another 20 miles away. She spent six weeks at the new hospital and survived. When she came home, a letter arrived: The air ambulance company said she owed $52,112 for the trip.

Last year, Congress abandoned its attempt to prevent surprise bills like this one, and coronavirus patients are now paying the price. Bills submitted to The New York Times show that patients often face surprise charges from out-of-network doctors, ambulances and medical laboratories they did not pick or even realize were involved in their care.

The plan to ban these kinds of bills was popular and bipartisan, and it was backed by the White House. It fell apart at the eleventh hour after private-equity firms, which own many of the medical providers that deliver surprise bills, poured millions into advertisements opposing the plan. Committee chairs squabbled over jurisdictional issues and postponed the is-

sue. Then the pandemic struck.

‘How Am I Going To Pay This All Off?’ The Pennsylvania patient had no way of knowing that her helicopter, which transported her between two in-network hospitals, did not have a contract with her health insurance plan. Nor could she have known that the air ambulance service, owned by a private-equity firm, faces multiple lawsuits over its billing tactics.

Her health plan, Independence Blue Cross, initially said it would pay $7,539 of the bill, according to billing documents reviewed by The Times, but then rescinded the money. The patient, housebound because of lingering coronavirus symptoms, was left with the full amount.

“She was intubated and on a ventilator when her providers felt it was necessary that she be transferred,” said Leslie Pierce, a division chief at the Pennsylvania Insurance Department, who handled the complaint that the patient submitted to the agency. “She had no decision in the selection process.”

About 450,000 Americans have been hospitalized with the coronavirus.

Even for those covered by robust health insurance, hospitalization can generate significant medical bills. To understand the true cost of coronavirus hospitalizations, and the impact these medical bills have on patients, The Times has been inviting readers to share their bills.

The resulting database, which now in-

An air ambulance above Beaumont Baptist Hospital in Beaumont, Texas, on Sept.

1, 2017. Air ambulance charges are often the most costly type of surprise medical bills.

cludes more than 350 reader submissions, shows that coronavirus patients are encountering the same surprise medical bills that have plagued the health system for decades.

While President Donald Trump told the country “not to worry” about the disease after his three-day coronavirus hospitalization, other survivors say the cost of care causes tremendous anxiety at a moment when they want to focus on recovery.

Some patients report feeling overwhelmed by the pile of bills that greet them at home. One-third of hospitalized coronavirus patients reported an altered mental state after contracting the disease, according to a study examining neurological symptoms.

Many patients struggle to do basic tasks, such as cook or pay bills.

Surprise medical bills happen when patients receive care from an out-of-network provider they did not choose. These charges are common in certain corners of the health system like the emergency room, where 20% of patients are vulnerable to surprise medical bills.

The bills are especially pervasive after ambulance trips: One recent study found that as many as 71% of those rides could result in surprise, out-of-network bills.

“We were shocked to see that,” said Dr. Karan Chhabra, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the lead author of the study.

Gaps in the Pandemic Protections After failing to pass comprehensive billing reform, Congress tried in relief packages passed this spring to shield coronavirus patients from surprise charges. It set up a $175 billion provider relief fund to aid hospitals and doctors on the front lines of battling coronavirus. As a condition of accepting those funds, medical providers agreed not to send surprise medical bills to their patients.

Many health insurers have promised to cover plan members’ coronavirus hospital stays in full, another effort to hold patients harmless.

But these protections leave significant gaps, as patients are beginning to find.

While many hospitals and doctors received provider relief funds, a number of medical laboratories and ambulance services did not. That leaves those providers free to bill however they’d like.

Insurers’ policies that cover coronavirus hospital stays, meanwhile, sometimes do not include the ambulance ride it took to get there — or follow-up care to treat

long-term symptoms.

“The government is telling people if you have coronavirus, you cannot get surprise-billed,” Chhabra said. “It’s incredibly counterproductive if people cannot trust the policies meant to protect them when they’re getting care for this illness.”

Air ambulance bills are often the most costly type of surprise medical bills.

Chhabra found a median charge of more than $38,000, leaving the typical patient responsible for more than $21,000 after the insurance payout. The prices are quickly increasing, too, rising about 15% each year since 2015.

In recent years, numerous states have enacted laws that restrict surprise out-ofnetwork billing similar to the one Congress nearly passed. But states cannot regulate air ambulance fees. Courts have repeatedly interpreted the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act as protecting air ambulances from any state rate setting.

Only the federal government can intervene by amending the Airline Deregulation Act. The congressional package would have done that, even though the air ambulance industry has generally opposed this policy.

The Pennsylvania patient, who asked not to be identified because she was recovering, was transported by Conemaugh Medstar, an air ambulance serving southwest Pennsylvania. The private equity firm American Securities owns its parent company, Air Methods, which is among the largest air ambulance services in the United States. Air Methods currently faces six separate class-action lawsuits in federal court, where patients describe expensive charges and aggressive debt collection tactics.

In one case, the company sought to garnish $53,034 from a patient’s bank account.

Air Methods contends that those bills are six to eight years old, and that it has since reformed its debt collection practices.

Ground ambulances, another source of surprise bills for coronavirus patients, have also largely escaped billing regulations.

California passed legislation in 2017 that barred most types of surprise medical bills, but it excluded ambulances. The congressional deal that nearly passed also did not include ambulances. Legislators may be reluctant to regulate ambulances because many are run by local and municipal governments, which rely on the charges for revenue.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Apple introduces new iPhones, promoting their 5G capability

By BRIAN X. CHEN and JACK NICAS

A

pple unveiled its newest iPhone on Tuesday, showcasing a model that is thinner, smaller and lighter than its predecessor, and capable of operating on the next generation of cellular networks, called 5G. The iPhone 12, the successor to last year’s iPhone 11, has an improved screen and faster chip, among other upgrades. It has smooth, flat edges, unlike the rounded corners of past models. The screen uses OLED, a brighter display technology that replaces the older LCD technology in the last entry-level iPhone, and Apple said it toughened the glass of the touch screen, making it four times more likely to survive a drop.

The iPhone 12 will also come in two screen sizes: 5.4 inches and 6.1 inches. The smaller model, called iPhone 12 Mini, may appeal to people who prefer smaller phones.

Apple also introduced upgrades for its iPhone Pro models, its more expensive smartphones. These premium models have an extra camera lens, and their processors are slightly more powerful for taking special photos with extra high-resolution, which Apple calls deep fusion. They also include a Lidar scanner, a depth sensor that uses lasers to scan 3D objects, which could improve augmented-re-

ality applications.

As he took the wraps off the iPhone 12 on Tuesday, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, emphasized its compatibility with 5G networks.

Cook talked at length about 5G, calling it “super fast” and offering a “new level of performance for downloads and uploads.” But notably, his description lacked specificity: He did not say how much faster 5G was than current 4G phones, which many would already consider to be super speedy.

Carriers like AT&T and Verizon have hyped 5G as a life-changing technology that can process data so fast that a feature-length movie could be downloaded in seconds.

But in the near term, the new cellular technology probably won’t be a big leap forward.

The much much-hyped, ultrafast variant of 5G is known as “millimeter wave.” But its reach is limited right now. Its signals travel shorter distances, able to cover a park in New York but not a broad swath of the city, for example, and they have trouble penetrating obstacles like walls.

The version of 5G that most cellular networks are shifting to will have speeds that are roughly 20% faster than current 4G networks offer, and its main benefit is reducing a lag known as latency. When you do a web search on your phone, for example, the results show up after a time

lag that can often last hundreds of milliseconds. In theory, 5G technology will shave that down to a few milliseconds.

Nonetheless, Apple and other handset makers, including Google and Samsung, are working to help carriers communicate the network shift to consumers.

Apple has stuck with a proven pricing model for the new devices, releasing the entry-level phones at $700 and up and higher-end phones starting at $1,000 — both prices in line with previous years’.

What is different this year: Apple will sell four iPhone models, up from its typical three in recent years.

At the entry level, the iPhone 12 Mini will start at $700 and iPhone 12 at $800. Last year, the iPhone 11 started at $700, meaning the flagship iPhone 12 device will start at $100 more.

On the higher end, the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max will start at $1,000 and $1,100, identical to last year’s pricing for the latest models.

Apple might have been able to hold prices mostly steady this year by no longer including headphones and a power adapter with each phone.

The company said the move was spurred by environmental concerns, but it also likely saved money and will lead many customers to buy extra accessories.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

13

While Boris Johnson sinks, Rishi Sunak is on the rise

By STEPHEN CASTLE

B

reakfast starts at 8 a.m. and guests help themselves to croissants and juice before the sleek figure of Rishi Sunak, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, works his way around the crowded, oak-paneled dining room of his official London home, No. 11 Downing Street.

For Sunak, meetings with groups of Conservative Party lawmakers help him reach out and forge a network of support in Parliament. For the lawmakers, it’s a chance to meet someone many expect to one day move next door — to No. 10, the prime minister’s home.

Sunak was virtually unknown 10 months ago, and his vertiginous rise has surprised almost everyone in British politics — in all likelihood even the man who promoted him, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose approval ratings have plummeted during the pandemic.

“Rishi Sunak has the strengths that the prime minister so conspicuously lacks, not only basic competence but a grasp of detail,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, “and no one has mounted such an obvious, in your face, social media campaign as Rishi Sunak.”

It seems to be working. A recent poll of party members by the ConservativeHome website placed Sunak, 40, easily top of Cabinet satisfaction ratings, while Johnson was almost bottom of the list.

Contrast that with a survey that Bale conducted in December in which Conservative Party members were asked who should take over were Johnson to step aside.

“Just five out of 1,191 named Rishi Sunak,” he said, “and I’m not sure that all of them spelt his name correctly.”

When he was catapulted into his job in February, after two years as a minister — including six months in the No. 2 job at the Treasury — Sunak was firmly in the shadow of Johnson, who had just won a landslide election victory.

But while Johnson has floundered during the coronavirus pandemic, Sunak has been a beacon of calm and competence, intervening swiftly to spend billions of pounds supporting jobs as the economy went into lockdown free fall. With new restrictions

When Rishi Sunak became chancellor of the Exchequer in February, he was firmly in the shadow of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Now, he is seen as a potential successor. coming into force in parts of the country, Sunak has announced new state support for affected areas, and Monday he gave a fluent defense of his latest measures at a media conference alongside Johnson.

Perhaps wisely, given the speculation about his ambitions, Sunak tried to burst his own bubble when the Conservative Party held its recent party conference virtually.

In a surprisingly short speech, he lavished praise on Johnson and warned that uncomfortable economic choices lay ahead.

The subliminal message seemed to be: “You might like me a little less when all this cash has to be paid back.”

But right now, they like him a lot, and his appeal among nonpartisan Britons has been burnished through slick social media posts on Instagram and Twitter designed around “Brand Rishi.” Allies insist that Sunak is simply using digital media techniques to communicate more effectively rather than to promote his ambitions.

His posts stand out from the drab detritus of political advertising, though. Often they feature a stylish photograph of the chancellor endorsing a policy with his distinctive signature, rather like a sporting celebrity might promote an expensive fitness accessory.

This was probably not what Johnson

expected when he promoted Sunak to take over from Sajid Javid, who resigned as chancellor after refusing to accept curbs on his right to hire his own advisers. Sunak agreed, leading some to speculate that he would be more compliant.

In Britain, the relationship between prime minister and chancellor — although a central pivot of government — is often one of rivalry and tension. So the idea in February was to ensure that there was one center of power on economic policy: in No. 10.

But few prime ministers can afford to fire two chancellors, so Johnson was taking a risk in appointing someone as adept and diligent as Sunak.

Not only is Sunak a smooth communicator, but, with his Indian heritage, he is a walking success story of modern multiracial Britain.

His grandparents, originally from Punjab, arrived in England from British colonial East Africa in the 1960s. As a teenager, he says he suffered racist abuse.

“It stung, I still remember, it’s seared in my memory,” he told the BBC, recounting how he had been abused in a restaurant.

But while Javid, his predecessor, was the son of a bus driver from Pakistan, Sunak’s father was a doctor and his mother ran a pharmacy. Together, they earned enough

to send him to an elite private school, Winchester College.

Without that expensive education, Sunak might well still have reached Oxford University (he graduated with top grades).

But his schooling seems to have helped instill the confidence and social polish that has allowed him to move effortlessly through the ranks of the Conservative Party.

Before his political career began in earnest, Sunak also earned an MBA at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Akshata Murthy, a daughter of one of India’s richest men, billionaire Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, an IT giant.

Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and two hedge funds before being elected to Parliament in 2015. In the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, he voted to leave.

That decision sped his promotion through the ranks, although some hard-line Brexit supporters say that they suspect it was a tactical move and that they believe he is pressing Johnson to strike a trade deal with the European Union.

Some day, Britain will have to start to repay its huge pile of debt. Johnson neither wants to return to austerity nor to raise taxes, but some decision cannot be delayed indefinitely.

Sophia Gaston, director of the British Foreign Policy Group and a fellow at the London School of Economics, said, “The chancellor has been in the privileged position of playing Father Christmas throughout the pandemic, one of the few politicians bearing gifts rather than taking them away.”

“Tax rises are on the horizon,” she added, “and he will soon have to take tough decisions about which industries to prop up and which parts of the electorate to shield from the worst of the pandemic’s economic hit.”

Should unemployment rise to levels not seen since the 1980s, Sunak would surely take at least some of the blame.

But, Gaston noted, he has already shown himself to be an outstanding communicator and a consultative and pragmatic leader.

“If his branding can remain strong during the next six months of economic doom and gloom, there can be no limits on the scope of his political ambitions,” she said.

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

From rural India, he worshipped Trump and built a shrine

Bussa Krishna in February at his shrine to President Trump, at his home in the southern Indian state of Telangana.

Mr. Krishna died on Sunday.

By SHALINI VENUGOPAL BHAGAT and MIKE IVES

I

n India, where many admire President Donald Trump, one rural farmer worshipped him like a god, praying to a lifesize statue of Trump in his backyard every morning.

“At first everyone in the family thought he was mentally disturbed, but he kept at it and everyone eventually came around,” said Vivek Bukka, a cousin of the farmer, Bussa Krishna.

When Trump announced he had the coronavirus, it devastated Krishna. The farmer posted a tearful video on Facebook in which he said: “I feel very sad that my god, Trump, has contracted the coronavirus. I ask everyone to pray for his speedy recovery.”

He stopped eating to show solidarity with his idol’s suffering from COVID-19, his family said. He fell into a deep depression. On Sunday, he died of cardiac arrest.

Krishna’s devotion had made him into a minor celebrity, and he was the subject of some national headlines. His death made news across India.

Vivek said his cousin had been physically fit and had no health problems or history of heart disease. There is no evidence linking Krishna’s death to his fasting.

There is no indication that the White House or Trump — who said he had recovered from the virus and felt “powerful” after being treated with a cocktail of drugs — was aware

of his biggest fan in India. Many of the country’s urban intellectuals dislike the U.S. president, and he is regularly mocked on Indian social media platforms.

But the president has support in other corners of Indian society. A February study by the Pew Research Center found that 56% of people surveyed in India said that Trump would “do the right thing when it comes to world affairs,” up from 16% when he was elected.

Trump’s popularity in some parts of India is striking because the cult of personality he has tried to cultivate — of an unapologetically brash figure leading the United States to a bright new future while espousing “America First” — mirrors how India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, projects himself to his own supporters.

Krishna, a widowed farmer in his thirties who lived in the village of Konne in the southern state of Telangana, had been a Trump devotee for about four years. He became a fan when the president appeared to him in a dream, his relatives said, and predicted that India’s national cricket squad would beat its archrival, Pakistan, in a match the next day.

India won, Vivek said, “and from that day he started worshipping Donald Trump.”

But the farmer also admired the president as a leader, said Vivek, a 25-year-old accountant who lives near the southern city of Hyderabad. His cousin did not speak English, and the local news outlets where he lived paid scant atten-

tion to U.S. politics. So he relied on Vivek to translate articles and videos for him.

Vemula Venkat Goud, Konne’s village headman, said that the young farmer had also been drawn to Trump’s “straightforward ways and blunt speech.”

Neighbors did not know much about U.S. politics and had no opinion of Trump, he added. But since Krishna was such a huge fan, they embraced his cause as a courtesy, even if it struck them as a little odd.

As Krishna’s devotion to Trump intensified, he began fasting every Friday in support, and he commissioned the construction of a shrine in his backyard with the life-size statue, Vivek said. He worshipped it with Hindu rituals for an hour or two each morning, as one might when praying to Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha or other gods in the Hindu pantheon.

One video of Krishna that has circulated widely online shows him performing a prayer ritual, or pooja, before an altar that holds a picture of Trump.

In another, he wears a T-shirt that reads “Trump” in white block letters as he pours water over the head of the statue, which is wearing a red tie and giving a thumbs-up.

The Trump statue has a garland of fresh flowers around its neck and a red tilak — a traditional symbol that is made of vermilion or sandal paste, and used in religious ceremonies — on its forehead.

Krishna’s creation of a statue in Trump’s likeness is not unique. An architect built a giant wooden statue of Trump with vampire’s teeth in Slovenia, the native country of the first lady, Melania Trump. Some critics denounced it as a “waste of wood.”

That statue’s creator, Tomaz Schlegl, an architect, had a clear vision, and message, in mind. “I want to alert people to the rise of populism, and it would be difficult to find a bigger populist in this world than Donald Trump,” he told Reuters.

A life-size wooden sculpture of Trump near the town of Sevnica in eastern Slovenia, where she grew up, was set on fire. The commissioning artist replaced it with a bronze statue.

As for Krishna, he made a valiant attempt to meet his idol. He traveled to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi before Trump’s trip to India in February to try to arrange a meeting, Venkat, the village headman, said.

“It’s really sad that his dream never came true,” he added.

Trump later addressed a stadium packed with 100,000 cheering attendees in Ahmedabad, the heart of Modi’s political home base.

Krishna kept the faith until the end.

When he learned of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, he locked himself in his room, Vivek said.

“We tried to force him to eat, but he barely ate anything,” he said.

On Sunday, Krishna collapsed, and his relatives took him to the hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

Krishna is survived by his parents and his 7-yearold son.

Venkat said villagers were discussing how best to maintain their neighbor’s Trump shrine.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

15

For Indian women working as cooks and nannies, no #MeToo moment

By EMILY SCHMALL and HARI KUMAR

N

annies, cooks, construction workers, farmhands and other women who are primarily employed in India’s informal jobs sector are still routinely sexually harassed and abused at work because a groundbreaking federal law is rarely enforced, a study has found.

According to Human Rights Watch, India’s federal and local governments have not done enough to promote and carry out the functions of the country’s 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act. The law, known as the Posh Act, mandates that employers with 10 or more workers set up committees to receive and investigate complaints of sexual harassment.

While the global #MeToo movement inspired a host of Bollywood actors and well-known Indian writers to come forward with allegations of sexual harassment, poorer Indian women are less likely to speak out.

The Human Rights Watch report focuses on workplace harassment, but Indian women are routinely subjected to harassment and abuse in and outside of their homes, sometimes with deadly consequences. Poor women and those from lower castes are most likely to be victimized.

Mina Jadav, a trade union leader who represents women in the informal sector in the western Indian state of Gujarat, said sexual harassment, including slurs and physical violence, were commonplace.

A protest against sexual harassment in the workplace in New Delhi in 2018.

“On many occasions, women will not complain. If the victim is a young girl, then more chances that she will not speak. Families try to hide the incidents,” Jadav said.

Under the Posh Act, complaint committees must be led by a woman and include at least one outside expert in the field of sexual harassment. The committees have the power of a civil court to subpoena witnesses and evidence, and can recommend remedies, including actions against the alleged perpetrator ranging from fines to termination.

But for 195 million workers employed in the informal jobs sector — 95% of the

women employed in India, according to Human Rights Watch — it is up to local governments to create district-level committees to educate women about their rights and to receive and process sexual harassment complaints.

Gender discrimination, the stigma associated with speaking out and a backlogged court system where cases of all kinds linger for years have led women to avoid seeking and receiving justice.

The Posh Act was created to give women an alternative to the courts, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “More people are reluctant to go to the police or go to the

court — that is almost always a barrier for people to report because they find that it could take away years of their lives,” she said.

Employers have been slow to adapt to the law, according to Vishal Kedia, founder of Complykaro, a Mumbai-based consultancy that helps companies with compliance.

According to Complykaro, more than 40% of companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange reported zero sexual harassment complaints between the fiscal years 2015-19.

“They may not be doing awareness, hence the fear still exists of coming forward to file a complaint,” Kedia said.

The situation is most stark for women in the informal sector, according to Human Rights Watch, which relied on 85 interviews in three Indian states with workers, trade union officials, activists, lawyers and academics.

“In many of the places either the committees are not in existence or if they have come to existence then the members are not notified, or not enough training has taken place. So there are challenges of implementation,” said Sunieta Ojha, a lawyer in Delhi who has represented many women in civil sexual harassment suits against male colleagues or bosses.

In response to general criticism about the Posh Act, India’s powerful home minister, Amit Shah, presided over a committee of ministers that in January made a list of recommendations, including adding workplace sexual harassment to India’s penal code.

Tunisia says 18 members of parliament are stricken with coronavirus

By LILIA BLAISE

E

ighteen members of Tunisia’s parliament have tested positive for the coronavirus, the body’s doctor, Maher Ayadi, announced Tuesday.

Several cases among lawmakers were reported after a full parliamentary session Oct. 2, one of only two such meetings held since July. A number of lawmakers had announced that they tested positive

on Facebook.

Tunisia has seen a sharp spike in virus cases in recent days. Of the 32,556 cases reported since the start of the outbreak, more than 10,000 were reported in the last seven days, according to a New York Times database.

The country had been an exception in the region, reporting very few cases at the start of the pandemic. Tunisia quickly imposed a strict lockdown, including a

nationwide curfew and the closure of international borders for almost two months.

But after reopening the borders in June, the country began to report new cases linked to international travel. Authorities imposed a two-week nightly curfew in several cities last week to halt the uptick.

Only a few hundred intensive care beds are available throughout Tunisia, and doctors have expressed concern that the health care system is at risk of being

overloaded.

In a meeting of officials tasked with fighting the coronavirus Tuesday, Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi announced that people who do not wear masks in public spaces will be fined starting this weekend.

He added that it was important to balance health and economic concerns as the country confronts the surge in cases and to “help every sector over the economic crisis.”

16 Thursday, October 15, 2020

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

China got better. We got sicker. Thanks, Trump.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A

s I watched the first Trump-Biden debate, a vision popped into my head. I imagined that the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party had also gathered to watch the debate — but its members decided to make it more entertaining by playing a drinking game. Every time Donald Trump said something ridiculous or embarrassing for America, each Politburo member had to down a shot of whiskey. Within a half-hour, all 25 members were stone-cold drunk.

How could they not have been? They were watching something they had never seen before — the out-of-control antics of an incoherent American president, a man clearly desperate to stay in office because losing could mean his prosecution, humiliation and liquidation all at the same time.

And who can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China, is still rampaging through America’s economy and citizenry — even though we saw the whole thing coming.

Alas, we aren’t who we think we are.

COVID-19 was supposed to be China’s Chernobyl.

It’s ended up looking more like the West’s Waterloo. That is the argument that John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge make in their new book, “The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It.” According to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus trac-

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ker, America has suffered 65.74 COVID deaths per 100,000 people, or about 216,000 total. China has lost 0.34 per 100,000, or about 4,750 people. Maybe China’s fibbing. OK — so quadruple its numbers — China still has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.

Indeed, early this month, days after Trump’s White House became a superspreader site and millions of Americans were afraid to send their kids to school, China, with close to zero local transmissions, saw millions of its citizens flocking to bus stations, train stations and airports to travel all across their country for a national holiday. On Oct. 1, Bloomberg reported, “The Chinese yuan is drawing attention as a haven from volatility after its best quarter in 12 years.” China’s September imports and exports both surged.

That used to be us!

For America to bounce back would require, for starters, a national plan to deal with COVID-19. China had one: It deployed all the tools of its authoritarian surveillance system — tools designed to track and trace political dissidents to control the population — to track and trace those infected with the coronavirus and control its spread. Some of China’s facial recognition technology is so good, you don’t even have to take off your face mask. Your eyes and upper nose will do.

America cannot employ such a strategy. We don’t have an authoritarian government (yet), and I sure don’t want one.

But we failed to produce a democratic consensus to do the same job.

On March 28, Trump declared, “Our country is at war with an invisible enemy.” He vowed to summon “the full power of the American nation” to defeat it. But it never happened. Outside of the first responders and health workers, acts of public solidarity and wartime willingness to sacrifice have been minimal or evanescent.

Why? It’s not because democracies are incapable of governing in a pandemic — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand have done much better than us.

In part, it’s because we have a uniquely individualistic culture, a highly fragmented local-state-federal power-sharing system, a frail public health system, a divided body politic,

a Republican Party whose business model has long been to cripple Washington, and so many people getting their news from social networks that amplify conspiracy theories and destroy truth and trust.

But what is most different is that we now have a president whose political strategy for reelection is to divide us, to destroy trust — and to destroy truth — and to declare any news hostile to his goals as “fake.” And without truth and trust in a pandemic, you’re lost.

In our last great pandemic, in 1918, lots of Americans did not mind wearing masks — look at the pictures — because their leaders asked them to do so and led by example.

But this time, the president never trusted Americans with the truth and led by dismissing the virus and mocking mask-wearing. So, many Americans never trusted him back.

As a result, we could never rationally discuss the sorts of trade-offs that a democracy like ours, with a culture likes ours, needed to make.

Public health expert Dr. David Katz argued in a New York Times op-ed and in an interview with me back in March that we needed a national plan that balanced saving the most lives and the most livelihoods at the same time. If we just focused on saving every life, we would create millions of deaths of despair from lost jobs, savings and businesses. If we just focused on saving every job, we would cruelly condemn to death fellow Americans who deserved no such fate.

Katz argued for a strategy of “total harm minimization” that would have protected the elderly and most vulnerable, while gradually feeding back into the workforce the young and healthy most likely to experience the coronavirus either asymptomatically or mildly — and let them keep the economy humming and build up some natural herd immunity as we awaited a vaccine.

Unfortunately, we could never have a sane, sober discussion about such a strategy. From the right, Katz said, we got “contemptuous disdain” for doing even the simplest things, like wearing a mask and social distancing. The left was much more responsible, he added, but not immune from treating any discussion of economic trade-offs in a pandemic as immoral and “treating any policy allowing for any death as an act of sociopathy.”

In sum, what ails us today is something that cannot be cured by a COVID-19 vaccine. We have lost the trust in each other and in our institutions and a basic sense of what is true — all necessary to navigate a health crisis together. We had them in previous wars, but not today’s.

I believe that Joe Biden was nominated by Democrats, and has a real chance to win, because enough Americans intuit that we’re sick with disunity and that Biden might be able to begin to reverse it. Biden’s victory will not be sufficient to make America healthy again — politically and physically — but it is necessary.

In the meantime, Russia and China, please do not invade us right now. We aren’t who we used to be.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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Fiscal federal Muldrow anuncia $844,543 para Ciencias Forenses Por THE STAR l fiscal federal W. Stephen Muldrow anunció E el miércoles, $844,543 en subvenciones del Departamento de Justicia al Instituto de Ciencias

Forenses de Puerto Rico para financiar laboratorios criminales, disminuir los atrasos de ADN, apoyar la investigación forense básica y aplicada, y ayudar a las fuerzas del orden a identificar a las personas desaparecidas.

Las subvenciones, otorgadas por la Oficina de Programas de Justicia del Departamento, son parte de 192 millones de dólares en fondos para promover la ciencia forense en todo el país.

“Los avances en la ciencia forense han brindado a los investigadores una extraordinaria variedad de herramientas que pueden emplearse para resolver crímenes y brindar respuestas a las víctimas y sobrevivientes, a menudo después de muchos años e incluso décadas”, dijo la subprocuradora general adjunta principal de OJP Katharine Sullivan en comunicación escrita.

“Estas inversiones en tecnología de lucha contra el crimen, desde el análisis de ADN hasta la toxicología de las drogas y la antropología forense, ayudarán a identificar y condenar a los perpetra-

dores, garantizarán la justicia para las víctimas inocentes y mantendrán a las comunidades seguras al disuadir de futuras actividades delictivas”, añadió.

“El Departamento de Justicia sigue comprometido con promover el uso de la ciencia forense

y continúa haciendo recomendaciones importantes en este componente integral de nuestro sistema de justicia penal. El anuncio de hoy marca un paso más en los esfuerzos del departamento para fortalecer la práctica de la ciencia forense en los laboratorios y salas de audiencias de nuestra nación”, dijo el fiscal federal Muldrow.

“Buscamos continuamente formas de garantizar que las pruebas forenses se recopilen, analicen y presenten de manera responsable y científicamente rigurosa. Este dinero de la subvención proporciona recursos adicionales a un socio importante y valioso en nuestros esfuerzos continuos para reducir el crimen en Puerto Rico: el Instituto de Ciencias Forenses de Puerto Rico”, añadió.

Desde 2004, la Oficina de Programas de Justicia ha recibido una asignación anual para ADN y otras actividades de ciencia forense. La financiación, administrada a través de la Oficina de Asistencia Judicial de la OJP y el Instituto Nacional de Justicia, respalda el análisis de ADN, la mejora de la capacidad del laboratorio y la investigación en ciencias forenses que brindan conocimientos y herramientas para mejorar la calidad y la práctica de la ciencia forense.

Romero propone Alianza Municipal Metropolitana para beneficiar la infraestructura de Bayamón, Guaynabo y San Juan Por THE STAR l candidato a la alcaldía de San Juan por el ParE tido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), Miguel Romero, junto al alcalde de Bayamón, Ramón Luis Rive-

ra, hijo y el alcalde de Guaynabo, Ángel Pérez, anunciaron el miércoles, lo que será la “Alianza Municipal Metropolitana” a partir de enero 2021.

Romero explicó que la alianza surge como una alternativa para atender prontamente la gama de condiciones que atentan contra la seguridad, la salud, el bienestar y la tranquilidad de los sanjuaneros.

“El establecimiento de iniciativas que maximicen el trabajo en equipo y la coordinación de recursos en beneficio de todos los constituyentes es parte de las herramientas que se deben considerar para comenzar a atajar los problemas que enfrenta la Ciudad Capital”, sostuvo el candidato a la poltrona capitalina en comunicación escrita.

Dicha iniciativa tendría lugar a partir de enero 2021 una vez los candidatos a dichas alcaldías bajo el PNP —Ramón Luis Rivera en Bayamón, Ángel Pérez en Guaynabo y Miguel Romero en San Juan— resulten victoriosos en los comicios de noviembre.

Por su parte, el alcalde de Bayamón, Ramón Luis Rivera manifestó que “durante años, en el municipio de Bayamón hemos establecido diver-

sas alianzas para potenciar los servicios que ofrecemos a nuestros constituyentes. Los gobiernos municipales hemos enfrentado diversos retos que hacen imprescindible la innovación y creación de estos mecanismos. Con esta alianza, pretendemos aunar esfuerzos que redunden en el beneficio de todos”.

“A partir de enero de 2021, continuaremos añadiendo alternativas para ofrecerle mejores servicios a la ciudadanía. Mediante la Alianza Municipal Metropolitana unificaremos recursos para el recogido y disposición de escombros y desperdicios sólidos; la limpieza y el mantenimiento de parques municipales; la reparación, la limpieza y el mantenimiento de vías públicas municipales; y el mantenimiento y limpieza de tomas de acueductos pluviales, entre otros servicios indispensables para toda la ciudadanía”, detalló el alcalde de Guaynabo, Ángel Pérez.

El también senador explicó que la Alianza no se limitará a estos tres municipios. Los tres suscribientes de la alianza procurarán que otros municipios de la zona metropolitana se puedan unir una vez concertada la iniciativa en enero 2021, para el beneficio de todos los residentes de la zona metropolitana.

Detalló que los residentes de San Juan, Guaynabo y Bayamón —además de las restantes ciudades que componen el anillo de la zona me-

tropolitana—no distinguen las demarcaciones municipales en su vida cotidiana. Por tanto, sostuvo, no deben ser penalizados por diferencias de colindancias municipales cuando necesiten servicios o infraestructura que les provean una mejor calidad de vida.

El desarrollo de esta alianza se sostiene en el artículo 1.008 del Código Municipal de Puerto Rico, el cual da poder a los municipios para crear alianzas intermunicipales que permitan identificar problemas comunes a fin de planificar y desarrollar actividades o servicios conjuntamente para el beneficio de sus habitantes.

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How a Medusa sculpture from a decade ago became #MeToo art

By JULIA JACOBS

W

hen artist Luciano Garbati made his sculpture of Medusa holding Perseus’ severed head — an inversion of the centuries-old myth — feminism was not what he had in mind.

He wasn’t thinking of the #MeToo movement either: Garbati had created the work in 2008, nearly a decade before the movement went mainstream.

Garbati, an Argentine artist with Italian roots, was inspired by a 16th-century bronze: Benvenuto Cellini’s “Perseus With the Head of Medusa.” In that work, a nude Perseus holds up Medusa’s head by her snaky mane. Garbati conceived of a sculpture that could reverse that story, imagining it from Medusa’s perspective and revealing the woman behind the monster.

On Tuesday, Garbati’s sculpture — “Medusa With the Head of Perseus” — was reimagined as a symbol of triumph for victims of sexual assault, when it was unveiled in lower Manhattan, just across the street from the criminal courthouse on Centre Street.

A news release advertised the statue as an “icon of justice,” noting that the towering, nearly 7-foot-tall Medusa stood across from the building where men accused of sexual assault during the #MeToo movement were prosecuted, including Harvey Weinstein, who had been convicted of two felony sex crimes there in February. (The idea for the site predated the trial, but the sentiment remained.)

Standing in the center of Collect Pond Park, Medusa — her gaze low and intense — holds a sword in her left hand and Perseus’ head in her right. The head was designed after the artist himself — a convenient model.

In his application to the city’s Art in the Parks program, which reviews proposals for public art installations like this one, Garbati noted that Medusa had been raped

by Poseidon in the Temple of Athena, according to the myth. As punishment, Athena turned her wrath on Medusa, transforming her hair into snakes. The application stated that the story had “communicated to women for millennia that if they are raped, it is their fault.”

On Tuesday, Garbati’s sculpture was reimagined as a symbol of triumph for victims of sexual assault, when it was unveiled in Lower Manhattan, just across the street from the criminal courthouse on Centre Street.

At Tuesday’s unveiling in the park, where the statue will stand until the end of April, Garbati talked about the thousands of women who had written to him about the sculpture. Many saw the image as cathartic, he said.

But for some online commentators, the sculpture did not quite meet the moment.

As news about the sculpture’s planned installation spread, activists and observers on social media wondered why a piece of art meant to honor the #MeToo movement — which was animated, in large part, by an outpouring of personal stories from women — was created by a man.

Others wondered why, if the sculpture was intended to be about sexual violence, Medusa carried the head of Perseus and not Poseidon, her rapist. And some questioned the decision to depict Medusa as a lithe,

classically beautiful nude figure when she was described as a monster.

Garbati said in an interview that, by now, his sculpture had a sort of independence from him, a life of its own created by outsiders’ observations and interpretations.

“I would say I am honored by the fact that the sculpture has been chosen as a symbol,” he said. He noted how the whole project had helped him realize that he was a “product of a patriarchal society” himself.

As for the question of mythological accuracy, Garbati said his work was a direct response to Cellini’s sculpture, which depicts the story of Perseus slaying Medusa and then using her severed head as a weapon, harnessing her power of turning people to stone with her stare.

Regarding Medusa’s model-esque figure, Garbati suggests that critics consider the literature from a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that chronicles how artistic depictions of Medusa morphed from beastly to beautiful starting in the fifth century B.C. Bek Andersen, a photographer who worked with Garbati to install the sculpture in lower Manhattan, isn’t bothered by the gender of the artist.

“To me, it’s exciting that the artist is a man,” she said in an interview. “I think men feel left out of the Me-Too conversation, and

I think they’re afraid of what it means for them.”

In 2018, a decade after the creation of the original resin sculpture, images of Garbati’s sculpture began to spread online. It gained meme status after he posted photos of the work on Facebook, and it was used as a symbol of female rage when the #MeToo movement dominated the news.

Andersen’s involvement began around that time. Scrolling through Instagram in bed, she saw a photo of the work, and was immediately taken with it, particularly because of her interest in mythological characters and the concept of “flipping the script.”

Garbati’s sculpture was exhibited in a storefront pop-up gallery on the Bowery in 2018. With the help of an anonymous donor, Andersen and Garbati founded the Medusa With the Head project and started to generate 12-inch replicas of the piece, which sell for $750 each. (Ten percent of the proceeds are donated to the National Women’s Law Center.)

Last weekend, even after criticism of the new sculpture bubbled up on Twitter, Andersen said, the miniature replicas sold out on the website.

“Destabilizing the narrative as told through a patriarchal lens is really where the power of the work lies,” Andersen said.

“It causes a person to pause.”

Luciano Garbati stands in front of his sculpture, “Medusa With the Head of Perseus,” in Collect Pond Park in New York

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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Seeking pandemic theater? Your call will be answered shortly

The playwright Hansol Jung in Mystic, Conn., May 15, 2020. “Human Resources,” an aural experiment created by the Telephonic Literary Union and produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, uses the form of an automated phone system to speak to themes of isolation.

By ALEXIS SOLOSKI

A

few years ago, I clicked on an article claiming that the average human spends 20 minutes on hold per week, or approximately 13 hours per year. Consider me above average. Because last weekend I spent an hour and a half clambering through nearly every branch of an existential phone tree. Is it weird to say I enjoyed it?

“Human Resources,” an aural experiment created by the Telephonic Literary Union and produced by the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, uses the form of an automated phone system to speak to themes of aloneness and disorientation many of us feel. So in its way does “KlaxAlterian Sequester,” an immersive audio work that tries to make you feel better about pandemic life by positing an even grimmer alternate reality. These are pieces about trying and likely failing — no matter how many signal bars your phone shows — to connect.

While quarantine has given a boost to audio drama generally, these are among the few pieces that speak directly to us listeners and allow for our respons-

es. Both experiences have thought about what motivates us (lonesomeness, boredom) to put on our headphones and hit play. Or, in the case of “Human Resources” and the 14 calls I ultimately made, redial. That phone tree kept kicking me off. I’m trying not to take it personally.

Written by Brittany K. Allen, Christopher Chen, Hansol Jung and Zeniba Now, “Human Resources” just wants to make you happy. Or at least direct you to an appropriate customer service representative. It begins with an automated greeting, a robotic voice commanding you to listen carefully as the menu options have recently changed. Here’s the menu: Press “1” to file a claim for unhappiness. “2” gives you the Department of Conscious Rearrangement. “3” directs your call to technical support. “4” routes you to an actual human. (Allegedly.) “5” is a company directory that leads to outgoing voicemail messages for the creators and cast. Because I have a stubborn completist streak, I listened to them all.

Most options lead to other options, a mobile maze of forking paths — some infuriating, some surreal, some poignant, several merely dull. Listen long enough

and you can find aural gems nestled amid the thank-you-for-your-patience recordings. If you are an off-Broadway superfan, there’s also the fun of recognizing many of the voices. Is that Mia Katigbak? It is!

Still, it takes discipline to listen to “Human Resources.” Those 13 hours a year have trained most of us to tune out hold music and automated assurances as we wait for a sentient operator to come on the line.

I never could reach another human, despite the main menu’s promise, which gave “Human Resources” a melancholy and sometimes fractious feel, a buildup to a payoff that RSVPs and doesn’t show.

(Think “Waiting for Godot,” with Muzak.) But there are compensations, like the actor Jin Ha reading Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” Even the robot voice offers comfort. As I waited to file my unhappiness claim (subcategory: loneliness), the robot sympathized. “We are sorry to hear you are unhappy,” it said. And then, “This can’t be helping.”

Or maybe it can? Almost all of us are on hold right now, in one way or another. And the thought of so many people, all navigating an unnavigable moment, pressing buttons and entering codes in hopes of support is a funny kind of consolation.

There’s also the chilly reassurance of knowing that as bad as things are, they could be much, much worse. “KlaxAlt-

The playwright Christopher Chen in Chelsea, July 26, 2016.

erian Sequester,” a play for your smartphone, imagines a future in which alien life-forms arrive on Earth sometime later this year and promptly enslave humanity.

For reasons the extremely fuzzy premise can’t explain, you, a human, have been sent back from 2083 to 2020, when the KlaxAlterians made first contact, to listen in on their early communications.

“We can only break their hold on us if they understand who they think we are,” your bearded liaison (Ben Beckley) will tell you in a prerecorded video sequence.

The hourlong piece, which you are asked to perform alone in your home, has you look through alien eyes (assuming aliens have eyes) at what it is to be human. After the video, an audio sequence asks you to take an inventory of the human body. The inventory sounds a lot like a thesaurus run wild. “Rostral orifices at the anterior center of its neck orb”? Those would be your ears. “Gelatinous spheroids enveloped in folds of skin”? Your windows to the soul. Subsequent audio files then move you from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and back, exploring alimentation, purgation and other mundane aspects of the day-to-day.

The piece ends in an irritating indeterminacy, and it’s doubtful that these audio tracks would help aliens understand humanity, or the inverse. Will the six minutes I spent considering the mechanics of my bathroom free us from our alien shackles? Unlikely. As in “Human Resources,” connection falters.

“KlaxAlterian Sequester” stands on firmer and more humane ground when it makes the familiar strange, asking us to think deeply about what we often take for granted — the facts of the human body and its lived environment. I didn’t think that after this many months indoors my tiny apartment could ever seem foreign. But for that hour it did. Even the simple act of sipping a glass of water felt weird and charged.

There’s a bit more to “KlaxAlterian Sequester” — interstitial sound files to listen to as you move from room to room.

Those sequences suggest something awfully bleak. In this dark future world, humanity barely survives. But hold music is still going strong.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

‘Totally under control’ review: In the middle of a pandemic response Alex Gibney’s film arrives early in an inevitable wave of Covid-19 documentaries.

warnings were lost in a din of complacency, incompetence and political calculation.

Not all of these interviewees or their messages have broken through to the public consciousness.

By BEN KENIGSBERG It is startling, for instance, to hear Dr. Eva Lee, who models infectious diseases, rolific documentarian Alex Gibney estimate that when the United States conhas always worked quickly, but “Tofirmed its first case of COVID-19 in Washtally Under Control,” which he diington state, a time lapse and the possibilrected with Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia ity of cascading spread meant that 2,000 Harutyunyan, finds him revisiting headlines people needed to be tested and weren’t. for which the ink has barely dried.

Dr. Francis Riedo in the Seattle area recalls Surely viewers, unless they’ve been testing mystery pneumonia patients in his distancing in an internet-free bunker for the intensive care unit early in the outbreak past 10 months, don’t lack for reminders of and finding that all but one had COVID-19. the current global pandemic. There is also (Gibney explains in voice-over that the filmno shortage of reporting on how the United makers sought to take precautions during States botched its response. Furthermore, a interviews, sometimes by sending a readyfixed feature documentary on current events made camera system to the subjects.) invariably lags behind breaking news. The New York Times reporter Michael D. movie can’t do much more than shoehorn a Shear, who himself tested positive for the major late development into a closing title coronavirus Oct. 2, summarizes the concard: “One day after the completion of this flicting messages offered by the Trump film, President Donald Trump revealed that administration’s medical experts and ecohe had tested positive for Covid-19.” nomic boosters. (Another Times reporter, So who exactly needs a documentary Eric Lipton, is credited as a consultant.) And on a by-now intensely familiar and rapidly Max Kennedy Jr., who volunteered to help evolving global cataclysm? And what pura task force assembled by Jared Kushner pose could it serve? For a start, Gibney told obtain personal protective equipment, dethe Los Angeles Times that he wanted the scribes a blind spot of the administration’s film to function as a “report card” on the industry-first approach. “The whole philosgovernment’s handling of the pandemic ophy of the task force was that the governthat viewers could see before they voted. ment can’t get things done,” he says.

But “Totally Under Control” has another, Most of what’s in “Totally Under Conimplicit goal: It elevates voices who soundtrol” has been thoroughly covered elseed early alarms about the virus and whose where, and even the particular clips of angry, maskless supermarket shoppers are likely to be familiar to many viewers. To the extent that this fast-paced recap has a method, it’s to distill the institutional failings of the past year to a continuously involving and outraging two-hour highlight reel. At that, the movie succeeds, even if it’s a reel that A scene from the documentary “Totally Under demands a follow-up.

Control.”

P

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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How the pandemic is changing our exercise habits

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

A

re you exercising more or less since the coronavirus pandemic began?

According to a new study that focused on physical activity in Britain, most of us — not surprisingly — have been less physically active since the pandemic and its waves of lockdowns and quarantines began. Some people, however, seem to be exercising as much or more than before, and surprisingly, a hefty percentage of those extraactive people are older than 65.

The findings have not yet been peer reviewed, but they add to a mounting body of evidence from around the globe that the coronavirus is remaking how we move, although not necessarily in the ways we may have anticipated.

The pandemic lockdowns and other containment measures during the past six months and counting have altered almost every aspect of our lives, affecting our work, family, education, moods, expectations, social interactions and health.

None of us should be surprised, then, to learn that the pandemic seems also to be transforming whether, when and how we exercise. The nature of those changes, though, remains rather muddled and mutable, according to a number of recent studies. In one, researchers report that during the first few weeks after pandemic-related lockdowns began in the United States and other nations, Google searches related to the word “exercise” spiked and remained elevated for months.

And many people seem to have been using the information they gleaned from those searches by actually exercising more. An online survey conducted in 139 countries by RunRepeat, a company that reviews running shoes, found that a majority of people who had been exercising before the health crisis began reported exercising more often in the early weeks after. A separate survey of almost 1,500 older Japanese adults found that most said they had been quite inactive in the

A masked runner and his dog pass St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown Manhattan on April 12, 2020. Many of us have been moving less since the pandemic began, but some, including many older men and women, seem to be moving more. early weeks of lockdowns, but by June, they were walking and exercising as much as ever.

A gloomier June study, however, using anonymized data from more than 450,000 users of a smartphone stepcounting app, concluded that, around the world, steps declined substantially after lockdowns began. Average daily steps declined by about 5.5% during the first 10 days of a nation’s pandemic lockdowns and by about 27% by the end of the first month.

But most of these studies and surveys relied on people recalling their exercise habits, which can be unreliable, or looked at aggregate results, without digging into differences by age, socioeconomic group, gender and other factors, which might turn up telling variations in how people’s exercise habits might have changed during the pandemic.

So, for the new study, which has been posted at a biology preprint site awaiting peer-review, researchers at University College London turned to data from a free, activity-tracking smartphone app available in Britain and some other nations. The app uses

GPS and similar technologies to track how many minutes people had spent walking, running or cycling, and allows users to accumulate exercise points that can be used for monetary or other rewards. (One of the study’s authors works for the app maker, but the company did not provide input into the results or analysis of the research, according to the study’s other authors.)

The researchers gathered anonymized data from 5,395 app users living in Britain who ranged in age from adolescence to older adulthood. All of them had been using the app since at least January, before the pandemic had spread to that country.

The researchers used data from the app on users’ birth dates and ZIP codes to divide people by age and locale to learn how much they exercised in January. Then they began comparing, first to the early days of social-distancing restrictions in various parts of Britain, then to the stricter lockdowns that followed and finally, to the dates in midsummer when most lockdowns in that country eased.

They found, unsurprisingly, that almost everyone’s exercise habits

changed when the pandemic started.

An overwhelming majority worked out less, especially once full lockdowns began — regardless of their gender or socioeconomic status. The drop was most marked among those people who had been the most active before the pandemic and among people younger than about 40 (who were not always the same people).

After lockdowns lifted or eased, most people began exercising a bit more often, but, in general, only those older than 65 returned to or exceeded their previous minutes of exercise.

The results are surprising, said Abi Fisher, an associate professor of physical activity and health at University College London, who oversaw the new study, “especially because 50% of the older group were 70 or older.”

Of course, these older people, like the other men and women in the study, downloaded and used an exercise app, which distinguishes them from a vast majority of people around the world who do not use such apps. The study also looked only at “formal” exercises like walking, running or cycling and not lighter activities like strolling or gardening, which can likewise benefit health and most likely also changed during the pandemic.

And the study tells us nothing about why exercise habits differed for people during the pandemic, although some mixture of circumstance and psychology may very likely be a factor.

Older people probably had more free time for exercise than younger adults who are juggling child care, work and other responsibilities during the pandemic, Fisher said. They also might have developed greater concerns about their immune systems and general health, motivating them to get up and move.

Far more large-scale and longterm research about exercise during the pandemic is needed, she said. But for now, the message of the available research seems to be that we may all want to monitor how much we are moving to help assure that we are exercising enough.

24 LEGAL NOTICE SUMMONS (CITACION JUDICIAL) NOTICE TO DEFENDANT: (AVISO AL DEMANDADO):

RYAN ANDERSON and DOES 1 to 20, inclusive

YOU ARE BEING SUED BY PLAINTIFF (LO ESTÁ DEMANDANDO EL DEMANDANTE):

AIMCO VENEZIA LLC

NOTICE: You have been sued.

The court may decide against you without your being heard unless you respond within 30 days. Read the information below. You have 30 CALENDAR DAYS after this summons and legal papers are served on you to file a written response at this court and have a copy served on the plaintiff. A letter or phone call will not protect you. Your written response must be in proper legal form if you want the court to hear your case.

There may be a court form that you can use for your response.

You can find these court forms and more information at the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www.courtinfo.ca.gov/ selfhelp), your county law library, or the courthouse nearest you. If you cannot pay the filing fee, ask the court clerk for a fee waiver form. If you do not file your response on time, you may lose the case by default, and your wages, money, and property may be taken without further warning from the court.

There are other legal requirements. You may want to call an attorney right away. If you do not know an attorney, you may want to call an attorney referral service. If you cannot afford an attorney, you may be eligible for free legal services from a nonprofit legal services program.

You can locate these nonprofit groups at the California Legal Services Web site (www. lawhelpcalifornia.org), the California Courts Online Self-Help Center (www.courtinfo.ca.gov/ selfhelp), or by contacting your local court or county bar association. NOTE: The court has a statutory lien for waived fees and costs on any settlement or arbitration award of $10,000 or more in a civil case. The court’s lien must be paid before the court will dismiss the case. ¡AVISO! Lo han demandado.

Si no responde dentro de 30 días, la corte puede decidir en su contra sin escuchar su versión. Lea la información a continuación. Tiene 30 DÍAS DE CALENDARIO después de que le entreguen esta citación y papeles legales para presentar una respuesta por escrito en esta corte y hacer que se entregue una copia al demandante. Una carta o una llamada

@

telefónica no lo protegen. Su respuesta por escrito tiene que estar en formato legal correcto si desea que procesen su caso en la corte. Es posible que haya un formulario que usted pueda usar para su respuesta. Puede encontrar estos formularios de la corte y más información en el Centro de Ayuda de las Cortes de California (www.sucorte. ca.gov), en la biblioteca de leyes de su condado o en la corte que le quede más cerca. Si no puede pagar la cuota de presentación, pida al secretario de la corte que le dé un formulario de exención de pago de cuotas.

Si no presenta su respuesta a tiempo, puede perder el caso por incumplimiento y la corte le podrá quitar su sueldo, dinero y bienes sin más advertencia.

Hay otros requisitos legales. Es recomendable que llame a un abogado inmediatamente. Si no conoce a un abogado, puede llamar a un servicio de remisión a abogados. Si no puede pagar a un abogado, es posible que cumpla con los requisitos para obtener servicios legales gratuitos de un programa de servicios legales sin fines de lucro. Puede encontrar estos grupos sin fines de lucro en el sitio web de California Legal Services, (www.lawhelpcalifornia.org), en el Centro de Ayuda de las Cortes de California, (www.sucorte.ca.gov) o poniéndose en contacto con la corte o el colegio de abogados locales.

AVISO: Por ley, la corte tiene derecho a reclamar las cuotas y los costos exentos por imponer un gravamen sobre cualquier recuperación de $10,000 ó más de valor recibida mediante un acuerdo o una concesión de arbitraje en un caso de derecho civil. Tiene que pagar el gravamen de la corte antes de que la corte pueda desechar el caso.

CASE NUMBER: (Número del Caso): 198MCV01124 The name and address of the court is: (El nombre y dirección de la corte es): SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES Santa Monica Courthouse 1725 Main Street Santa Monica, CA 90401.

The name, address, and telephone number of plaintiff’s attorney, or plaintiff without an attorney, is: (El nombre, la dirección y el número de teléfono del abogado del demandante, o del demandante que no tiene abogado, es): Robert C. O’Brien, Paul A. Rigali, Timothy C. Tanner LARSON O’BRIEN LLP 555 S. Flower Street, Suite 4400, Los Angeles, CA 90071 Tel: (213) 436-4888; Fax: (213) 623-2000 Email: robrien@larsonobrien-

law.com; prigali@larsonobrienlaw.com; ttanner@larsonobrienlaw.com DATE (Fecha): 06/18/2019.

Clerk, by (Secretario): Marcos Mariscal, Deputy.

a la publicación del presente edicto, se le estará enviando a usted por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda presentada al lugar de su última dirección conocida: ParLEGAL NOTICE celas Seguis Nuevas Bo. FronESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO ton, Carr. 146 KM 14. 2, Ciales, DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- PR 00638; HC 2 Box 80206, NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Ciales, PR 00638-9793. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del SALA DE CIALES. Tribunal en Ciales, Puerto Rico, ORIENTAL BANK, hoy día 30 de julio de 2020. ViDemandante, V. vian Y Fresse Gonzalez, SecreADALBERTO taria. Camren M. Burgos Ortiz, MONTERO ROSADO, Sec Auxiliar.

Demandado CIVIL NUM.: CI2020CV00026.

LEGAL NOTICE SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. EMDE PUERTO RICO TRIBUPLAZAMIENTOP OR EDICTO. NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMESALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE. RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIParte Demandante Vs. BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO ASSOCIATES RICO. SS.

A: ADALBERTO MONTERO ROSADO

POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la radicación de una demanda en cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que usted adeuda a la parte demandante, Oriental Bank, ciertas sumas de dinero, y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado de este litigio.

El demandante, Oriental Bank, ha solicitacto que se dicte sentencia en contra suya y que se le ordene pagar las cantidades reclamadas en la demanda.

POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos ( SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra, y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

El abogado de la parte demandante es: Jaime Ruiz Saldaña, RUA número 11673; Dirección: PMB 450, 400 Calle Calaf, San Juan, PR 00918- 1314; Teléfono: (787) 759-6897; Correo electrónico: legal@jrslawpr. com. Se le advierte que dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORA TION H/N/C CITIFINANCIAL; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, Como posibles tenedores desconocidos

Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM: PO2020CV01189.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE posibles tenedores desconocidos

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dírección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ surnac/ , salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda.

Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva. al PO BOX 7970. Ponce P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-8434168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado .

Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré de fecha el día veintiocho (28) de junio de dos mil seís (2006) , bajo testimonio número ochocientos cuarenta (840), a favor de Assocíates lntematíonal

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020 Holdings Corporation. h/n/c Citifinancíal . h/n/c Citifinancial, o a su orden , por la suma de cuarenta y dos mil cuatrocientos dólares ($42,400 .00). con intereses al nueve punto dos seis nueve por ciento (9.269%) , vencedero el tres (3) de julio dos mil dieciséis (2016), garantizado mediante la escritura número ciento seis (106), otorgada en Ponce , Puerto Rico, el día veintiocho (28) de junio de dos mil seis (2006), ante la notario público Melissa E. González Fiel, dicha hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio ciento cuarenta y dos (142) del tomo ciento cuarenta y dos (142) de Juana Díaz, finca número doce mil seiscientos cincuenta y nueve (12,659) inscripción tercera (3ra). Que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación : RÚSTICA: Parcela marcada con el número mil ochenta y cinco (1085) en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Aguilita del Barrio Sabana Llana término municipal de Juana Díaz. con una cabida superficial de setecientos setenta y siete punto cincuenta y nueve 9777.59) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con la calle de la comunidad; por el SUR, con la Sucesión Serralles; por el ESTE, con parcela número mil ochenta y seis (1086) de la comunidad y por el OESTE, con la parcela número ciento ochenta y cuatro (1084) de la comunidad. Inscrita al folio sesenta y uno (61) del tomo trescientos veinticuatro (324) de Juana Diaz, finca número doce mil seiscientos cincuenta y nueve (12,659). Registro de la Propiedad de Ponce Sección Primera (1). SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aqui dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Ponce, Puerto Rico, a 30 de septiembre de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Garcia, Sec Regional. Madeline Rivera, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO.

DLJ MORTGAGE CAPITAL INC.

Parte Demandante Vs.

DORAL BANK ahora BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO; John Doe y Richard Doe, Como posibles tenedores

desconocidos

Parte Demandada CIVIL NUM: HU2020CV00913.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO posibles tenedores desconocidos

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto.

Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/. salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Leda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-8434168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré de fecha veintisiete (27) de julio de dos mil seis (2006), bajo testimonio número tres mil seiscientos treinta y siete (3,637), a favor de Doral Bank ahora Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma de noventa y cinco mil dólares ($95,000.00) con un interés al siete punto cero cero por ciento (7.00%) anual, vencedero el primero (1ro) de agosto de dos mil treinta y seis (2036), según consta de la escritura número dos cientos noventa y tres (293) otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico el veintisiete (27) de julio de dos mil seis (2006) ante el notario Rey Javier de León Colón. Inscrito folio sesenta y seis (66) del tomo quinientos sesenta y seis (566) de Humacao, finca número diez nueve mil quinientos noventa y cuatro (9,594 ), inscripción séptima (7ma). Que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación URBANA: Solar marcado con el número setenta y dos (72) del bloque D de la Urbanización Villa Palmira, radicado en el Barrio Rio Debajo de Humacao, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de cuatrocíentos cincuenta punto cero cero (450.00) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de veinticinco punto cero cero (25.00) metros,

con el solar número setenta y tres guion D (73-0); por el SUR, en una distancia de veinticinco punto cero cero (25.00) metros, con el solar setenta y uno guion O (71-D; por el ESTE, en una distancia de dieciocho punto cero cero (18.00) metros, con la calle número cuatro (4) del proyecto; por el OESTE, en una distancia de dieciocho punto cero cero (18.00) metros, con el solar número noventa y cuatro guion O (94-0). Enclava una casa. Inscrita at folio doscientos (200) del tomo doscientos cincuenta y seis (256) de Humacao, finca número nueve mil quinientos noventa y cuatro (9,594) del Registro de la Propiedad de Humacao. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Humacao, Puerto Rico, a 30 de septiembre de 2020.

Dominga Gomez Fuster, Sec Regional. Marisol Dávila Ortiz, Secretaría Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE, LLC Demandante v.

SUCESIÓN DE MADELINE MELÉNDEZ QUINTERO, COMPUESTA POR SUS MIEMBROS: FULANO, SUTANO Y MENGANA DE TAL; JANE DOE, PETER DOE, COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: CG2020CV01224.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO)EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

MELÉNDEZ; JANE DOE, PETER DOE, COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria y ejecución de gravamen mobiliario (reposesión de vehículo) en la que se alega que la parte demandada SUCESIÓN DE MADELINE MELÉNDEZ QUINTERO, COMPUESTA POR SUS MIEMBROS: ANGEL LUIS MUNDO MELENDEZ, ELSIE LEE MUNDO MELÉNDEZ, ANGEL LUIS MUNDO RODRÍGUEZ, EN LA PORCIÓN DE CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; JANE DOE, PETER DOE, COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS, le adeudan solidariamente a Americas Leading Finance, LLC., la suma de principal de $10,962.59, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. El abogado de la parte demandante es el Lcdo. Gerardo Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverlaw.com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Caguas, Puerto Rico, hoy día 2 de octubre de 2020.

Carmen Ana Pereira Ortiz, Secretario (a). Jessenia Pedraza Andino, Subsecretario (a).

A: SUCESIÓN DE MADELINE MELÉNDEZ QUINTERO, COMPUESTA LEGAL NOTICE POR SUS MIEMBROS: ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO ANGEL LUIS MUNDO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBURODRÍGUEZ, EN NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA LA PORCIÓN DE SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN CUOTA VIUDAL JUAN. USUFRUCTUARIA, LEONEL SHUB MIZRAHI Demandante VS. ELSIE LEE MUNDO

The San Juan Daily Star

EDNA ORTIZ MERCADO, FULANO DE TAL Y FULANA DE TAL, POSEEDOR DESCONOCIDO

Demandados CIVIL NUM.: SJ2019CV09351.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

Se le apercibe y notifica que si no contesta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del termino de treinta (30) días de la publicacion de este edicto, se le anotara la rebeldía y se dictara sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin mas citársele ni oirsele. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, a 30 de septiembre de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, SECRETARIA GENERAL. Maria Serrano Soto, Sec Auxiliar.

Thursday, October 15, 2020 to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de CAROLINA.

REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING, LLC. Demandante v.

creción lo entiende procedente.

El sistema SUMAC notificará copia al abogado de la parte demandante, el Lcdo. Kenmuel J. Ruiz López cuya dirección es: P.O. Box 71418 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-8518, teléLEGAL NOT ICE fono (787) 993-3731 a la direcESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO ción kenmuel.riuz@orf-law.com DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- y a la dirección notificaciones@ NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA orf-law.com.

EXTENDIDO SALA DE CAGUAS. BAJO MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, en Caguas, , Puerto MERCHANT Rico, hoy 27 de julio de 2020.

ADVANCE, LLC En Caguas, Puerto Rico, el 27 DEMANDANTE VS. de julio de 2020-. Carmen Ana MISION CELESTIAL Pereira Ortiz, Secretaria. TereDETECTIVE, INC. Y sita Vega Gonzalez, Secretaria OSVALDO RODRIGUEZ Auxiliar. de 2020. En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico, el 13 de OCTUBRE de 2020. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretario(a). JANNETTE RAMÍREZ BERNARD, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

SUCESIÓN DE SATURNINO VITERBO SÁNCHEZ BOBADILLA, T/C/ SATURNINO V. SANCHEZ, T/C/C SATURNINO V. SÁNCHEZ COMPUESTA POR A: EDNA ORTIZ LEGAL NOTICE HELGA MAGALI SEDA MERCADO, CALLE Estado Libre Asociado de PuerRIVERA, T/C/C HELGA QUETZAL 885, COUNTRY to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL MAGALY SEDA RIVERA, CLUB SAN JUAN, DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriDELGADO Y FULANA FULANO DE TAL Y PUERTO RICO, FULANO mera Instancia Sala Superior DE TAL, AMBOS EN SU SUTANO DE TAL COMO DE TAL, FULANA DE TAL de CABO ROJO. POSIBLES HEREDEROS CARÁCTER PERSONAL COOPERATIVA DE Queda emplazado y notificado Y COMO MIEMBROS DE DESCONOCIDOS; de que en este Tribunal se ha AHORRO Y CREDITO LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE radicado una demanda por la HELGA MAGALI SEDA, DE CABO ROJO BIENES GANANCIALES causal de Cancelación de PaRIVERA T/C/C HELGA Demandante v. garé Extraviado. Se le notifica QUE ESTOS COMPONEN. M. SEDA RIVERA, T/C/C SUCESION AMERICA que deberá presentar su aleDEMANDADO HELGA MAGALY SEDA CIVIL NÚM.: CG2019CV04806.

CRUZ RAMOS gación responsiva a través dei RIVERA; CENTRO COMPUESTA POR Sistema Unificado de Manejo y SALON: 704. SOBRE: COBRO Administración de Casos (SUDE RECAUDACION DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENDANIEL DIAZ CRUZ Y MAC), al cual puede acceder TO PO EDICTO. DE INGRESOS PATRICIA DIAZ CRUZ utilizando la siguiente direcA: MISION CELESTIAL MUNICIPALES; Y A LOS T/C/P PATRICIA ANN ción electrónica: https://unired.

DETECTIVES INC ESTADOS UNIDOS DE COLLIER ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se MEDIANTE OSVALDO Demandado(a) AMÉRICA represente por derecho propio, Demandado(a) RODRIGUEZ DELGADO en cuyo caso deberá presen- Civil: Núm. ICCI201500655 . tar su alegación responsiva Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Civil: Núm. CA2019CV03905 O PEDRO DE JESUS en la Secretaría del Tribunal (REGLA 60). NOTIFICACIÓN (406) . Sobre: COBRO DE RODRIGUES O AGENTE Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE AUTORIZADO. de San Juan y enviando copia A: PATRICIA DIAZ CRUZ HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORA: OSVALDO DINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE a la parte demandante: Ledo.

T/C/P PATRICIA ANN SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. RODRIGUEZ DELGADO Ricardo A. Vargas, Ave. Apolo COLLIER #2098, Local 3-A, Guaynabo, (Nombre de las partes a las que se A: HELGA MAGALI SEDA Y F JLANA DE TAL PR 00969; teléfono (787) 294- le notifican la sentencia por edicto) RIVERA, T/C/C HELGA POR SI Y COMO 9238, Fax (787) 294-9237, EL SECRETARIO(A) que susMAGALY SEDA RIVERA, REPRESENTANTE DE LA correo electrónico: vargas- cribe le notifica a usted que T/C/C ELGA M. SEDA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE valle@gmail.com / rvargas@ el 27 de enero de 2017, este BIENES GANANCIALES vargasvallelaw.com dentro de Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, RIVERA; FULANO DE TAL los próximos treinta (30) días Sentencia Parcial o Resolución Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO COMPUESTAPOR del recibo del presente empla- en este caso, que ha sido debi- POSIBLES HEREDEROS AMBOS. zamiento. La demanda presen- damente registrada y archivada DESCONOCIDOS NOTIFIQUESE A LAS tada se relaciona con la finca en autos donde podrá usted en- (Nombre de las partes a las que se DIRECCIONES: número nueve mil quinientos terarse detalladamente de los le notifican la sentencia por edicto) ochenta y cuatro (9,584), ins- términos de la misma. Esta no- EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- Calle Modesto Solá #12 y crita al folio noventa y dos (92) tificación se publicará una sola cribe le notifica a usted que el 14 Caguas, P.1. del tomo doscientos cincuenta vez en un periódico de circula- 13 de OCTUBRE de 2020, este Villa Blanca Opalo V4, y dos (252) de Monacillos, Re- ción general en la Isla de Puer- Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Caguas, P.R. 0725. gistro de la Propiedad de San to Rico, dentro de los 10 días Sentencia Parcial o Resolución PO Box 276, Caguas, P.R. Juan, Sección Tercera (111y) siguientes a su notificación. Y, en este caso, que ha sido debi00726 los Pagarés extraviados cuya siendo o representando usted damente registrada y archivada cancelación se solicita son los siguientes: 1. Pagaré por la suma principal de $17, 000. 00, vencedero a la presentación, y constituido a través de la escritura de Hipoteca número 70, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 2 de septiembre de 1987 ante el Notario Público René Valentln Gordils. Inscrito al folio 95 del tomo 252 de Monacillos. San Juan 111, Inscripción sexta (6ta.). 2. Pagaré por la suma principal de $69,000.00, vencedero el día 1 de febrero de 2014, y constituido a través de la escritura de Hipoteca número 21, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 26 de enero de 1999, ante la Notario Público Pylar Jiménez Vélez. Inscrito al folio 255, tomo 829 de San Juan III. Inscripción novena (9na.).

una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 6 de OCTUBRE de 2020. En CABO ROJO, Puerto Rico, el 6 de OCTUBRE de 2020. NORMA G. SANTANA IRIZARRY, Secretario(a).

MARIA M. AVILES BONILLA, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archiLEGAL NOTICE vada en los autos de este caso, Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- con fecha de 13 de OCTUBRE

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de ste Edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramaiudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda o cualquier otro sin más citarle ni oírle, si el tribunal en el ejercicio de su sana dis-

25

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUJAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE BAYAMON.

LUIS G. ROIG, EVELYN TORRES ET ALS Demandante vs.

MUNICIPIO DE GUAYNABO ET ALS

Demandado CIVIL #BY2020CV01812. SOBRE: DAÑOS y PERJUICIOS. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DEI PUERTO RICO ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL

PRESIDENTE DE LOS EUA.

A: SONA BUILDERS LLC como uno de los codemandados en el caso.

Por la presente se notifica a ustedes, que se han presentado en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, la demanda de epígrafe, en la que en síntesis se alega que usted es parte indispensable por ser demandado en un pleito sobre daños y perjuicios.

Es abogado de lal parte demandante el Lcdo. Andrés J. Rodríguez Burgos, quien tiene bufete abierto en el #30 de la Calle Re-

parto Piñero, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00969-5650, Teléfono 787720-9553 y se notifica a usted que de no comparecer a contestar esta demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes después de haberse publicado el edicto, la parte demandante podrá solicitar la anotación de rebeldía y lograr que se dicte sentencia, concediéndosele el remedio solicitado sin más sin más citarle ni oirle. Extendido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, a 5 de octubre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. Yariliz Cintron Colon, Sec Auxiliar.

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

Browns’ ‘moneyball’ strategy scores wins after a few replacements

By MIKE TAINER

T

he Cleveland Browns tried just about everything from 2016-19 in an effort to escape decades of failure: embracing analytics, rejecting analytics, emphasizing character, ignoring character, austere scrimping, lavish spending — and sometimes attempting all of those tactics simultaneously.

Not surprisingly, the rapid succession of 180-degree lurches in organizational philosophy did not make the Browns better.

Until this season, that is. The Browns have a 4-1 record, and their balanced offense and fearsome pass rush have them poised to produce their first winning season since 2007 and reach the playoffs for the first time since 2002.

The secret to the team’s turnaround is that it is no longer seeking some secret method for turning things around.

The most recent epoch of Browns futility began when their controlling owner, Jimmy Haslam, hired Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer after a 3-13 finish in 2015. His front-office exploits for baseball’s Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s were recounted in Michael Lewis’ bestseller “Moneyball” and fictionalized in the feature film of the same name. DePodesta is revered as one of the founding fathers of sports analytics: Alexander Hamilton as portrayed by Jonah Hill, a data-driven maestro of the draft and trade markets renowned for turning short-term sacrifices into long-term dividends.

DePodesta was hailed as the Browns’ latest potential savior (there have been many), someone who could easily rebuild the roster by outwitting the fusty, anti-intellectual NFL establishment. Unfortunately, baseball and football are very different sports, and the Browns installed what looked like a shoddy version of “Moneyball” based less upon statistical research than book jacket blurbs and existential riddles: Saving is spending. Losing is winning. Failure is the ultimate success.

For two years, the DePodesta team engineered trades to acquire draft picks and traded draft picks for even more draft picks in what seemed like an effort to restock the Browns’ nonexistent farm system. The coach, Hue Jackson, like the middle manager of some forgotten regional sales branch, appeared to grow a little too comfortable in an environment where winning was almost discouraged. The Browns were 1-31 over

two seasons, an anti-accomplishment even by their standards, but the team’s topsy-turvy messaging made it hard to tell whether the losses were part of a counterintuitive plan.

Haslam, who had burned through three sets of coaches and general managers since purchasing the team in 2012, replaced a top DePodesta lieutenant, Sashi Brown, with a traditionalist general manager, John Dorsey, late in the 2017 season. Dorsey selected Baker Mayfield with the top pick in the 2018 draft, acquired Odell Beckham Jr. in a trade with the New York Giants, and made other moves that signaled a shift in the team’s priorities from “win in some far-flung future” to “win soon.”

Describing what happened next in a few

sentences would be like trying to summarize the French Revolution on a cocktail napkin.

After a rolling series of boardroom clashes, Jackson was fired, Dorsey gained greater control of football operations, DePodesta donned a phantom mask and disappeared into the rafters, and inexperienced Freddie Kitchen rose from obscurity to become the Browns’ offensive play caller midway through the 2018 season.

Kitchens’ brief tenure unfolded like the sequence in a campus comedy where the lads of Alpha Kappa Chugga lock the dean in his closet and declare every week to be Greek Week. Having finished the 2018 season with a 5-2 hot streak and after earning a little too much preseason hype, the Browns played as if they expected to reach the

playoffs through sheer talent and rebellious swagger.

They went 6-10 instead, as Kitchens committed basic strategic blunders, Beckham and Myles Garrett got into on-field altercations with opponents, and Mayfield regressed at quarterback while publicly feuding with the local and national news media. Few teams have ever allowed so little success to go so completely to their heads.

Kitchens and Dorsey were fired at the end of the 2019 season, with DePodesta reappearing from a trap door beneath the stage to introduce yet another cast of characters, led by general manager Andrew Berry and coach Kevin Stefanski.

Superficially, the latest leadership change looks like the result of another boardroom coup, with DePodesta ousting Dorsey’s royalists and inserting inexperienced, analytics-friendly functionaries with scanty résumés in their place. But the newcomers appear more committed to winning games than engaging in thought experiments: They acquired veteran talent in their first offseason instead of using last year’s “Animal House” shenanigans as justification for another “Moneyball”-themed roster purge. Analytics now operate under the hood for the Browns instead of flapping like a flag mounted from the car’s antenna.

It’s tempting to interpret the Browns’ current success as a triumph for DePodesta’s initial vision, though it would also be rather sad to interpret four early-season wins after four years of upheaval as any sort of “triumph.” More accurately, the Browns have finally built a quality roster despite themselves, with some key pieces arriving during the first “Moneyball” dynasty (Garrett, wide receiver Jarvis Landry), many during the Dorsey rebellion (Mayfield, Beckham, running backs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt) and a few during the current Grand Reformation (offensive lineman Jack Conklin, tight end Austin Hooper).

The 2020 Browns are enjoying success because they are a talented team that executes fundamentally sound game plans each week instead of prematurely boasting of their pending greatness or adhering to a franchise-building paradigm that sounds suspiciously like a multilevel marketing scheme.

It’s a simple formula that won’t inspire any intellectual movements or feature films. But it’s working, at least for now.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

27

In England, shifting virus rules close doors one day and open them the next

By RORY SMITH

T

here were two soccer games played over the weekend at Hayes Lane, a neat, compact stadium in a quiet corner of southeast London. The first, on Saturday afternoon, played out in the pin-drop silence that characterizes sports amid the pandemic. Just as they are in the Premier League, fans were barred from attending when Bromley FC — the team that owns the place — faced Torquay United in English soccer’s fifth tier.

On Sunday, it was the turn of Hayes Lane’s other occupant, Cray Wanderers, to play. Cray sits a couple of divisions below Bromley, its landlord for more than two decades. Most years, its games attract only a couple of hundred fans.

“We are the oldest club in London,” said Sam Wright, its chief executive.

“We might have the oldest fans, too.”

Wright had been expecting this particular weekend to be different. With no Premier League games on television, thanks to an international break, he had been hoping for as many as 500 fans to come down. In the end, the crowd numbered just 357: more than Cray might normally have attracted, but still, as Wright said, “rather disappointing.”

Still, that two games in the same sport might be held on the same weekend, in the same stadium, and under disparate regulations is indicative of the confusing — and often contradictory — labyrinth of rules and restrictions that has marked Britain’s attempts to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

After a summer in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson encouraged Britons to “eat out to help out” the ailing hospitality sector, the government has had a complete turnabout in recent weeks.

Last month, after weeks of telling office workers it was time to resume their daily commutes, the government reversed course, instructing them instead to continue to work from home wherever possible. Then, after first ordering pubs nationwide to close an hour earlier than normal, the government on Monday ordered them to close completely in Liverpool, the city deemed at the highest risk of coronavirus spread.

As recently as last week, Johnson had encouraged people to go to the cinema to stave off job losses. This week, he introduced a new three-tiered system of localized lockdowns, with several ci-

ties — mostly in the north of England — now governed by stringent limits on socializing, and some businesses ordered to close completely.

At the same time, several indoor arts venues in London — including the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Opera House and O2 Arena — have announced plans to reopen this winter in front of socially distanced audiences. Yet watching sporting events in large, outdoor venues remains banned.

Presently, the rules run like this: All so-called elite games must be held without fans. Elite, in this sense, applies to the top six tiers of the sport, from the glamorous, cosseted world of the Premier League all the way down to the National League North and South, divisions stocked with a mix of professionalized and semiprofessional teams.

Below that, in the squat, sprawling reaches of nonleague soccer, fans are permitted. But even then, how many of them are allowed varies from league to league. In some cases, there is a cap of 350. In others, it rises as high as 600.

Those capacities are not related to local rates of virus infections or the severity of regional lockdowns, but instead on a one-size-fits-all formula based on the size of the stadiums in each league.

Things become even more complex when teams from different leagues and levels meet, as they do in the early rounds of the FA Cup. When a team that qualifies as elite is at home, no fans are permitted. If a nonelite team is hosting an elite team, only home fans are allowed. If two nonelite teams play each other, home and away fans can attend.

As a statement from one team, Corinthian Casuals, made clear, the regulations give the impression that “the coronavirus is clever enough to distinguish” between fans of different sides.

The primary problem with the web of rules and diktats, though, is all the holes in it. Jeff Hutton, the general manager of Bromley — condemned to play without fans — said his club was focusing on how to stanch the financial damage from playing in an empty stadium. “It costs us to get the game on, to manage a livestream, as well as to pay the players,” he said. The British government has promised grants to help clubs like Bromley survive — several Premier League powerhouses recently floated a plan of their own — but the money has yet to appear.

Fans were barred when Bromley hosted Torquay at Hayes Lane on Saturday afternoon.

At the same time and in the same place, Cray is having a sudden attendance boom.

“We’re the highest level you can watch at the moment,” Wright said. “On a day like Sunday, when there is no Premier League on television, we’re hoping we can be quite a big draw.

“It seems strange to say it, given the situation, but it is helpful for us as a club.”

And at a time when millions of fans are unable to watch their clubs play in person — but have been told to go to the cinema and perhaps buy a ticket for the Royal Albert Hall, too — there are plenty of teams riding the same wave as Cray.

In southwest London, Corinthian Casuals have noticed an upturn in their crowds since their season started last month, aided by fans of larger teams taking the only chance they have to watch live soccer in person. “We have had fans of teams like Brentford and Fulham coming down,” one club official said.

“We’ve definitely noticed a trend in that direction.”

In the city’s northeast, Walthamstow FC has had its highest attendances “for 30 years,” said Andrzej Perkins, the club’s communications manager.

“We won’t keep hitting 300 every game, but it has been incredible for us,” he said. “We have had people coming to their first-ever football game. It’s local, it’s outdoors, you can spread out, and there isn’t much else to do.”

Keith Trudgeon, the communications manager at Stalybridge Celtic, a nonleague stalwart based near Manchester, confirmed that his team, too, is “above last season’s average.” But he said the effect has not been quite as pronounced as it might have been because there are simply so many places to watch lower-league soccer in the area.

“This is a bit of a hotbed,” Trudgeon said. “There are five nonleague teams on Tameside, so people have a choice.”

Only one of them, Curzon Ashton, is missing out: It qualifies as an elite team, so is not permitted to host fans at all.

Trudgeon, like many, is confounded by the rules. Stalybridge has the largest stadium in its league and he is adamant the club could safely welcome more fans than are currently permitted.

“Most grounds at this level are open access, with open stands,” he said.

“There are plenty of teams who could have games with a thousand people socially distanced and are not allowed to, and yet the cinemas are open. It’s nonsense.”

It is a view shared across England’s soccer landscape. This week, the game’s various authorities — including the Premier League and the Football Association, which governs the sport in England — started a petition to encourage the government to relax its rules and allow fans back into elite games, too, as has happened in Germany, France and the Netherlands.

They believe soccer, and sports more broadly, is being held back while other sectors are permitted to reopen, and that the rules, as they stand, make little sense.

A story from Walthamstow, perhaps, lends weight to that argument. “We had some police officers appear at one of our home games,” Perkins said. The officers had received reports that soccer fans had been spotted gathering in greater numbers than allowed in the neighborhood.

Fearing the fans might be heading to watch Leyton Orient, the nearest “elite” team, they were dispatched to investigate. That, after all, would have been illegal.

“But when they realized they were coming to watch us, they told us it was fine,” Perkins said. “They looked around and told us we were doing a good job making sure everyone was social distancing.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

At Cal, a COVID survivor keeps watch over football’s return

By JOHN BRANCH

T

he first true day of football practice felt mostly like any other: players, coaches, balls, whistles.

But the head coach wore a mask up to his eyes, looking like a Halloween mummy.

Equipment managers sprayed inanimate objects with a disinfectant from a Ghostbusters-style backpack. And the afternoon shadows spread early, as they do in October, usually the middle of the season.

Scurrying among the players, coaches and support staff — their numbers limited by state and local health officials — was a 47-year-old named Andrew McGraw. He wore shorts and a touch of gray in his hair.

McGraw has spent 24 years with the Cal football program. As director of football administration, he oversees its day-to-day operations. His most important role this fall is to keep the coronavirus away from the team.

It is a personal mission. McGraw is a COVID-19 survivor. He was laid up, miserably, for two weeks this summer. Four months later, he says he still feels fatigued.

His sense of smell is 60 percent or 70 percent of what it was.

He sees himself as a cautionary tale for college athletes.

“This is no joke,” McGraw said. “For those who are hearing that it’s a hoax, you almost want to shake them by the neck.”

Cal is part of the Pac-12 Conference, the last of the big-time leagues to rev up its football season. It is where The New York Times has been embedded this summer and fall, to chronicle the challenges of running major college athletic programs during a pandemic.

The Pac-12 hopes to play a seven-game season in November and December.

Nothing is certain. Among the 8 million coronavirus cases and 215,000 deaths in the United States, colleges and universities account for at least 178,000 infections and 70 deaths, according to a New York Times analysis. Outbreaks have postponed several college football games and sidelined entire teams, leaving colleges scrambling to patch together their seasons.

The big fear, beyond a team outbreak that could spread across campus and beyond, is the death of a player. At least two have died from the virus already.

Cal and the Pac-12, eager to swim with

other top conferences that are deep into their seasons, collecting attention and revenue, are just now wading into these daunting waters. During the summer, the Pac-12 had said it would delay football until 2021.

But then came the Hail Mary of daily rapid-result antigen testing, through a deal with Quidel, a diagnostic health care company based in San Diego.

That is how practice begins at Cal these days. Football players come to Memorial Stadium, head upstairs to the outdoor concourse near where fans would normally line up to buy hot dogs, and stick a swab deep into their own nostrils. A supervisor gauges whether it is a successful dig.

The tips of the swabs are put into vials of solution and hustled downstairs to a student study center, now retrofitted as a coronavirus testing lab. There, several Cal sports medicine employees, trained in a new and unexpected skill, mix each sample with a reagent. They transfer the liquid into a cassette that sits for 15 minutes. Then the cassettes are loaded into one of four machines, each about the size of a toaster.

Athletic trainer Jacob Janicki called it “as simple as using an Easy-Bake oven.” A result is returned in about 11 seconds.

At about $20 per test, it costs a few thousand dollars a day to test the Cal football team and its support staff. Through the first seven days of testing, McGraw said, there were no positive results.

This was expected to be a big year for Cal football. The Bears were 8-5 last year, including their first win over rival Stanford in a decade. A preseason poll picked Cal to finish second in the Pac-12’s North division behind Oregon.

But it is McGraw, not quarterback Chase Garbers, who might hold the key to this truncated season.

In late June, while vacationing in the California mountains with his family, McGraw developed a “wimpy” dry cough, he said. A fever followed, along with a sense of dread.

A test confirmed that he had tested positive (his family did not), and McGraw spent two weeks laid up at home, isolated and debilitated by body aches.

That was about the time that other top conferences around the country threw themselves into the football season. Back then, the Pac-12 was still hanging back.

As much as any college athletic department, Cal’s tiptoes on a thin wire. Its $100

Andrew McGraw, an assistant athletic director of football administration, tested positive for Covid-19 more than four months ago. He still feels fatigue and has diminished taste and smell. “This is no joke,” he said. million athletic budget faces a $50 million hole if football is canceled. But Cal mostly views itself as a leading university, not a football factory. A pair of Cal professors, separately, were awarded Nobel Prizes last week.

There may be more to lose than there is to gain by playing football, part of the uneasy risk-reward analysis colleges are making this fall. But the Pac-12 decided in late September to join the others, and so McGraw is preaching discipline to Cal’s football players.

“They’re seeing examples, week in and week out, as you look around the country, of just how fragile this all is,” McGraw said.

“It’s unbelievably delicate, this entire situation. It’s as if the whole building is being held together with one screw. This thing could fall apart if just one part gives.”

Cal must abide by an evolving slew of health regulations, recently loosened by state and local officials, which allowed the Pac-12’s four California teams to start practice with contact.

For now, Cal can have 75 players on the field, plus coaches and support staff, at any time, which means another 30 or so players practice separately, a sort of development squad. Masks are required everywhere, though most players wear neck gaiters, pulled up over their mouths, at least until their

helmets go on. Coach Justin Wilcox, under a visor, wears his gray model over his ears and up to his eyes, leaving a mere slit that he can see through. He roams practices, mummified, and pulls down his gaiter only to shout occasional instructions.

Where things feel much different is before and after practice. The football team cannot be indoors, generally, which means no visits to locker rooms or meeting rooms.

(An exception: Players can use the weight room, in limited numbers, because “gyms” in the area are open.) A large tent is where players are taped and iced by trainers.

Without access to the locker room, players find their helmets, jerseys and pads awaiting them on the field. After practice, they change into the clothes they will wear home, leaving their sweaty practice gear behind. On the way out, they grab a bag of fresh clothes to wear to practice the next day.

At the end of the first session last Friday, with the field deep in late-day shadows, Wilcox gathered the team at midfield. Players took a knee — helmets off, gaiters up — maybe a bit farther apart than usual. Wilcox preached the importance of self-discipline.

A few positive tests, after all, and the screw comes loose.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

29

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

If you’re making decisions on matters involving other people, you shouldn’t make commitments without involving them first. Your calm approach to sensitive issues makes this a good time to deal with legal and financial matters. You don’t care how much time it takes, you intend to get these moving.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

You’ve been feeling a little low and you could do with a change of scenery. Overwork is taking a toll on your health and you need to ease yourself into a more relaxed frame of mind. You don’t have to travel far to discover beautiful places on your doorstep. If you aren’t in the right mood don’t force yourself to get down to business.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

If it looks like someone needs some support and they would appreciate a helping hand.

A housemate is making repairs and improvements around the home. You might enjoy helping them fix items that have been broken for some time and this will save you all some money too. Some repair projects will be surprisingly fun.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

A friend’s behaviour is irresponsible and they’re making some careless choices. You are close enough for you to feel you should be making an effort to try to keep them in check.

After a few stern words they will get the message and you will feel more able to relax in their company.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

A friend will find themselves in a fix and you are the one they will turn to. Your talents in a certain field will come in useful. You are well qualified to help them out and it will bring you pleasure to be able to do so. Someone in the family is in a particularly good mood and they have a surprise in store for you, this evening.

Give your family a chance to think about it when it comes to discussing improvements you have in mind for the home. If you sense they’re not keen, hold on to these ideas for a short while longer. Wait until you sense the moment is right and you will get the full agreement from those around you.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You will get to take part in an event or activity that has always interested you. An offer will come from out of the blue. This will mean you have to rearrange plans already made but this won’t be a big inconvenience. You’re just grateful that someone thought of you and you have this chance to join in with something special.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Muddles and misunderstandings relate to joint financial commitments. If you want to avoid an argument, steer conversations away from anything financial. When it comes to your personal cash affairs, follow your instincts.

They will keep you right. You’re reluctant to support a community event that brings too many people together.

A joint hobby or interest will be rewarding as long as you are both in a sufficiently cooperative mood to work together. Any disagreements will escalate quickly making for a less harmonious time. Alternatively you might choose to miss out on a small family get together to attend to responsibilities away from home.

It might be time consuming to clear your home or workplace of clutter but it will make you feel a lot better. Untidy surroundings are getting you down. Simplifying your life is the solution. A loved one will help you sort out treasures from trash. Be ready to donate, discard or sell unwanted items.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’re concerned that some information which has been used for an enquiry has not been reliable. Be prepared to investigate the original source of some documents before quoting them. If a statement does not ring true for you, question further. Be sure people don’t use statements that have been proven to be unreliable

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Get important chores over with as soon as possible. You have big plans for later in the day and you don’t want anything getting in the way. You have a lot to look forward to.

You’re keen to strike in a new direction and if you get the offer you are hoping for, this will be your chance to do so.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, October 15, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, October 15, 2020

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